For a moment, she was gone. Completely disappeared beneath the surface. She popped back up a breath later, sputtering and shrieking. “Oh myGod.”
“How is it?”
“Terrible!” she shouted, swimming farther away from the shore. “You have to jump in.”
“I’ve never given in to peer pressure in my life,” said Soraya.
“First time for everything,” Daisy shouted back.
It was Soraya’s turn to set her basket down, though she muttered the entire time she did it aboutcavingandcompromising. She took a deep breath and scrunched up her whole face, along with a handful of her dress, and ran toward the shore, screaming the entire way until she flung herself into the water.
“You’ve lost your goddamned minds!” Nora yelled from the relative warmth and safety of the shore.
“Be free!” Daisy shouted.
“Befreezing, more like,” Nora said.
“Be in nature.” Soraya moved a little closer to the shore and spun with her arms hitting the surface of the water.
“You all look silly.”
“We don’t care.”
Nora couldn’t argue with that. She set her basket down, gathered up her skirt, and went to the very edge of the swimming hole. Before she could think better of it, she leaped off the ground and plunged into the water, the impact of it so intense she got an immediate brain freeze when her head went under the surface. When she came up, she was screaming. “This is awful!”
“And brilliant,” Daisy said.
This was something they might’ve done in high school. Maybe that was why it felt brave. Maybe that was why it felt revolutionary. Because life had intervened and made them afraid. Because it had taken the things they loved and turned them into trials, it had taken joy and sharpened it into a fine point, a weapon rather than a gift.
She couldn’t remember when she’d stopped being able to act without worrying that it exposed her as a feral foster child. She’d married Ben and had been so beset by the feeling she didn’t belong with him or in his life that she’d done everything she could to make herself seem normal. This day wasn’t normal. Maybe none of them were.
Maybe they were better than normal.
She rolled onto her back and floated there, looking up at the sky, looking up at the sun, letting herself feel everything. The parts that were too cold, the parts that were just right.
They only lasted a few minutes in the frigid water before they got out, their dresses sodden, and stood there on the bank wringing out their skirts as they gathered their baskets. They were laughing, out of breath.
“That was dumb.” Daisy laughed as she stumbled back down the path toward the car.
“You were the ringleader,” Nora said.
Daisy smiled. “I was. I didn’t plan it, and it wasn’t for anyone else. I didn’t care about looking stupid.”
Maybe that shouldn’t have been revolutionary. It was, though. They skipped back through the field, soggy now. Nora howled as they got into her car soaking wet. Everyone had parked at her house, with theidea that they would go back there and make some of their flower crowns over charcuterie boards and wine. Nora had a firepit in the backyard, and it was the perfect time of year to fire it up.
If she was honest,Benhad a firepit in the backyard, and once he got out of the hospital, she was going to have to deal with the fact that it wasn’t going to be her firepit anymore, or her house.
She was in the process of making the very difficult decision to not pursue any kind of support from him. She would miss the house, but she would rather disconnect from him. Not have any kind of tie to him anymore. Including his money.
She didn’t need to think about that right now. It was a vacation rental, in many ways. But then, it had been for quite some time. A place where he was represented, but not her.
She did love the firepit, though.
They turned the heater on high in the car, and when they got back to Nora’s house, she got blankets down from the closet and then pulled the meat and cheese boards out of the fridge and brought them outside to the lovely backyard area, where she lit a fire.
The flames exploded, reached up for the sky, and cast a halo of warmth on them as they sat in the Adirondack chairs placed around the firepit. They began to weave twigs together to make the bases of the flower crowns.
They added blossoms and ribbons, little things Aggie had given them for the project.
