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A waitress arrived, and they put in their drink and appetizer orders. She’d only taken two steps away from the table when Cass said, “All right, ladies. Let’s get the hard stuff out of the way.”
“We’re all really boring now,” Lauren said from the middle of the booth. She’d recently cut her dark hair, but it still fell to her shoulders. Sage smiled at the new do, because she’d done it, and she thought it fit Lauren’s face so well. She had delicate bone structure and pure beauty in her high cheekbones.
Sage had thinned her hair too, and she looked much more glamorous now—in Sage’s opinion.
Lauren caught her looking and said, “Unless Sage has something to tell us,” with her eyebrows raised.
Sage laughed and waved her off. “Sage does not.”
Bessie’s engagement was about a week old, and the whole story had been told over an app that recorded video instead of text. They’d been using that a lot more lately, and while Sage didn’t entirely dislike it, she didn’t like it either. She couldn’t check a quick text at work if it was a thirty-second video others might be able to hear.
And she could face the music, even if none of her friends could. None of them talked for only thirty seconds. Bessie’s engagement story had taken about thirtyminutesto get through from beginning to end.
Then all the reactions…
Sage usually played the videos in her car on the way home from work, or around the apartment if it was her turn to put together dinner. She and Thelma were simple eaters, and neither liked spending too much time in the kitchen, so eating out somewhere fancy like Bakersfield had perks.
“I know it’s okay if we swap Supper Club,” Cass said. “But I would like to get a schedule ironed out. I feel like if we don’t.” She paused and looked around the table at the rest of them. “It’ll be too easy not to do it.”
“I agree,” Joy said. “And I want to keep doing it. It’s way easier if I have it on my calendar, so other things don’t get scheduled over it.”
“Mm him,” Bea said. “So where are we?”
“February was supposed to be mine,” Cass said. “But I swapped with Lauren in November. Things have sort of been off since then.”
Sage didn’t argue, though she’d been assigned December last year, and she’d fulfilled her commitment just fine, busy holiday season and all.
“Joy, you’re usually after me,” Cass said. “Can you do next month?”
“Yep.” Joy had her phone out, and she started tapping with her thumbs. She looked up. “Do we need to revisit the date?”
“Third Thursday?” Bea asked. “That’s always what we’ve done.”
“Yes, but we don’t operate under the community center guidelines anymore,” Cass said. She looked around again, and Sage didn’t care what day of the week Supper Club fell on. Her life could be completely molded around it, even if they decided to make it a lunch club instead of dinner.
“I’m fine with whatever,” she said. Bessie and Joy nodded, and Lauren said, “Me too.”
“Let’s leave it there,” Joy said. “I’m in March.”
“That puts Bessie in April,” Cass said, actually reading from a small piece of paper that looked like it had come from a child’s notepad. “Lauren in May, Sage in June, Bea in July, and I’m in August.” She looked up, but Bea was already shaking her head.
“Grant and I are going on our National Park road trip all of July,” she said. “I won’t even be here for Supper Club that month, and I can’t host it.”
“August?” Cass asked, her lips only pursing for a moment.
“Yeah, I can do August.”
Cass made the note on her slip of paper and looked up again. “Everyone else good?”
“Yeah,” and “Yes,” and “Sure,” came from the others. Sage simply nodded, and since she’d already chosen what she wanted for dinner, her gaze wandered out into the restaurant. Everything gleamed in the evening light, and Sage sure did like the upscale atmosphere here.
The chatter at the table turned to less serious things than their Supper Club schedule, and to her surprise, no one called for them all to share something that month.
The drinks came; orders got put in; appetizers arrived. Sage laughed with Bea, asked about Shelby, her step-daughter, and listened as Lauren talked about a surgery her cat had to have.
She loved these ladies, and she’d been supping with them for so long, she couldn’t imagine not having this monthly occurrence in her life. That was why she’d moved here. It was why she’d given up the variety of the hobby farm and left it all behind.
“Oh, boy,” Joy said, and that drew Sage’s attention across the table to her. She sat on the end on the other side of the horseshoe, and she met Sage’s eye before nodding out into the restaurant.
