Evelyn produces her obituary notebook too. It’s a soft leather journal with a leather cord wrapping it shut and thick, torn-edge linen paper inside. If I weren’t selling or giving away everything I own before embarking on the next phase of my life as a life coach in residence in London for three months followed by at least two years of life as a digital nomad touring the States, I’d have severe journal envy.
Especially when she pulls out the fountain pen that she uses with it. “What are the odds he was cheating on her?” she asks Odette.
Odette sighs. “Let’s focus on the pre-final-wedding time of Steve’s life, shall we?”
“When did you and Steve date?” I ask Odette while she, too, digs into her bag for her obituary notebook.
“About three years ago,” she tells me as she pulls out the familiar hardback featuring a cat riding a unicorn with rainbows coming out of both of their eyeballs. “I went into the drugstore—the one by the park about four blocks over with the questionable window displays. I was looking for hand cream, and I left with his phone number.”
“He was in the Old Man Bikers Club,” Sheila tells me.
“He’s the reason wehatethe Old Man Bikers Club,” Evelyn corrects.
“And he passed on before he could see that we won the blood drive donor bet,” Odette muses.
“You think they’ll pay up?” Evelyn asks.
Sheila squints at her. “Why wouldn’t they?”
“Because they’re dicks,” Odette replies.
“But fair is fair,” Sheila insists.
Evelyn pats her hand. “Never change, my friend. Odette, you and I will handle collecting our winnings.”
Odette nods. “After dinner. Five minutes ladies, and…go.”
All three of them go head-down over their notebooks, their pens scratching, while I lean back in the plush booth with my spritzer, pop an earbud in, and attempt to relisten to the chapter I missed while my brain was wandering on my walk here.
I love this place. It’s two stories high with walls of windows, so even though we’re in the heart of a major city, there’s a good bit of light. Every table has leafy green plants. More vines and leafy plants hang between the copper light fixtures dangling from the beam ceilings. We don’t always get one of the plush velvet corner booths, but we’re in here regularly enough that the staff will sometimes save one for us.
Everything in our part of Copper Valley was once warehouses and factories that eventually closed down as the city changed from a manufacturing hub to the environmental engineering heart of the East Coast, but now, it’s a neighborhood with wine bars and the cutest bookstore and a cookie shop that I will miss almost as much as I’ll miss my friends.
Especially these friends.
We met when Odette hired me to be her life coach after one of her best friends passed away. She’d decided she wanted to live the rest of her years to the fullest instead of waiting around for her turn to be next. We’d been working together for maybe eight or nine months when she and her friends adopted me as one of their own after I went through a bad breakup.
And now I get to hang with them regularly and watch them create alternate obituaries for ex-boyfriends, and sometimes close friends, as their own way of mourning. Or they’ll invite me along when they volunteer at blood drives and other neighborhood events. Sometimes I call bingo numbers at the community centerin the basement of our apartment building, and sometimes they come and cheer on my niece for dance recitals and soccer practices.
Not that Hallie’s old enough to be exceptional at either yet, but she’s old enough to be freaking adorable when she tries.
And I’m getting teary-eyed again at leaving them to pursue my dreams and amazing opportunities, so I sip my spritzer, kill my audiobook, and slip over to the bar to order apps to share instead of waiting for our server to circle back to us.
I was supposed to be touring the world playing soccer. Doing in my own sport what my brother does in his. But when a freak injury on the field left me with a broken hip and broken dreams, I had to piece together a new life.
And now?
Now I don’t miss what I don’t have and I don’t regret the direction my life took. I love what I do. I love my job. I love my clients. I love speaking engagements and giving seminars on finding your passion. I love that I get paid to write books about my philosophies and experiences. I love teaching classes online and in person to help people find the courage to explore new opportunities in their careers, their love lives, and theirlifein that time when they’re not working or caring for everyone else. I love using social media to spread messages of belief in ourselves and trust in the world that when one opportunity slips away into the wind, another will appear.
I’m so excited to go to London. Excited for who I’ll meet and what I’ll learn and what I’ll give back. And it’s okay that I’m sad at what I’m leaving behind at the same time.
I get to be both. And in the meantime, I’m seizing every opportunity I can find here too.
Going to one last wedding with Odette as my plus-one. Taking Hallie on a pre-birthday date, since I’ll miss the actual day. Seeing friends for lunches and dinners. There’s still a cooking class I wantto take. I want to see the Thrusters, our local professional hockey team, play one more time, and I want to have a cheesy eighties movie night with my friends and apartment neighbors one last time too.
That’s what I’m thinking as I finish ordering apps at the bar to be delivered to our table and turn back to my friends.
What’s supposed to happen now is that I’ll go back to the table where Odette, Sheila, and Evelyn will each read the obituaries they’ve written for Drugstore Steve based on their knowledge of his life. Specifically, the juicier parts or the weirder parts or sometimes theverypersonal parts. We’ll laugh. We’ll gasp. One of them might actually shed a tear, because a mandiddie.
