“Hey, I’m trying here!”
She waved her hand as she bent over, laughing. “I know. I’m so sorry! I just can’t stop laughing…”
He watched her laugh, and then he started laughing, too.
The kitchen smelled terrible, the stir-fry was ruined, and neither of them seemed to care because they were in the kitchen laughing together for the first time in longer than either of them could remember.
“Pizza?” Claire said, wiping her eyes.
“Pizza,” Greg agreed.
They ordered pizza and ate it at the kitchen table, not in the den, and Greg asked her about the painting class she had coming up. Claire told him, and he had listened. He didn’t check his phone. He didn’t look toward the den. He sat across from her, ate pizza, and listened to his wife talk about watercolors.
It wasn’t perfect or easy, but it was the best dinner they’d had in years.
Harper brought Jordan to Beaufort on a Saturday afternoon. Claire had been preparing for this the way she prepared for everything, very thoroughly. She’d cleaned the house, made Greg promise to wear a shirt that actually had buttons, and baked a pound cake, because pound cake was her answer to every occasion. There was no reason to stop now.
Nina drove from Edisto with a bottle of wine and Elena’s empanadas, which Elena had insisted on contributing, because Elena was incapable of allowing a social gathering to occur without her food being present.
Jordan arrived driving Harper’s vehicle, which was a big deal because Harper never let anyone else drive, and she had apparently decided that she could ride shotgun as long as Jordan was the person driving the car. He unfolded himself from the car because he was tall. He had broad shoulders, brown hair with some gray at the temples. His face was handsome. He wore jeans and a blue button-down, with his sleeves rolled up to his forearms, and the kind of tan that came from working outside.
He shook Claire’s hand on the porch. His grip was warm and firm, and he looked her in the eye, which was a plus for Claire.
“Claire, I’ve heard so much about you that I feel like I should apologize for how long it took me to get here.”
“Well, that’s all Harper’s fault,” Claire said.
“It is entirely Harper’s fault,” he agreed, a quirk of a smile on his face as Harper stood behind him rolling her eyes.
Greg emerged from the house, as promised, wearing a buttoned shirt, and shook Jordan’s hand.
“You build furniture?” he said.
Within fifteen minutes, they were on the back porch talking about wood grain. Claire watched Greg lean forward in his chair with the kind of interest she hadn’t seen from him in years outside of a Braves game. She thought to herself, there you are. I forgot you could do that.
Then Nina arrived, and the evening started to take shape. The porch, the wine, and the empanadas that disappeared in twelve minutes because Elena’s empanadas were addictive.
Jordan fit into their group like a missing piece fits into a puzzle. He was easy. He laughed at the right moments and listened at the right moments. He told a story about the time Harper locked her keys in the car outside his workshop and then refused to call AAA because she was convinced she could break into her own vehicle using a YouTube tutorial. Turned out she could not, and Jordan had to cut a spare key from the one she had given him two years earlier.
“You kept my key?” Harper said. She was genuinely surprised.
“I kept everything,” Jordan said.
Harper looked at him. Claire saw it happen. It was the moment Harper let something go. Not everything, of course, not all at once, but a little piece of her wall came down visibly right there in front of everyone.
Harper leaned into Jordan’s shoulder, and Nina caught Claire’s eye across the porch. The look between them lasted only a split second, but contained thirty years of friendship, and the joy of watching someone you love finally stop running from happiness.
Greg returned from the kitchen with more wine and sat next to Claire. His knee brushed against hers, and neither of them moved away. That simple touch, so common yet profoundly meaningful, made Claire look away to hide her tears from others. They were sharing a moment at a dinner party naturally, without any prompting or therapy. Greg’s knee against hers, a seemingly trivial act of closeness, affected her deeply.
Nina called at ten o’clock the next morning. Claire was on the porch with her coffee, watching the river flow by, which was what she did on Sunday mornings now instead of cleaning. Greg was inside making them breakfast. He was doing it more often, the cooking, and the results were improving. They’d gone from disaster to edible. And last Thursday, he made something that could legitimately be described as good, although Claire would never tell him because she didn’t need to tell him it was good. The look on his face when he plated the eggs was the look of a man who already knew.
“I need to tell you something,” Nina said.
“Good something or bad something?”
“I don’t know yet. Both, maybe.”
She paused for a long moment.
