Marin shakes her head vigorously at Viv’s request. “Nope. Not ready.”
Viv lifts a hand, her hot pink nails flashing with the movement. “Fine. I’ll confess then. Guilty. And I thought this one had promise. He teaches breathwork and sound bathing.”
“That does sound promising.” Marin sets down her knitting needles, fully supportive even though I’m pretty sure she knows about as much about sound bathing as I do.
Viv sighs. “He brought his singing bowlson the date. Set them up right there on the table at the vegan café, told me he couldn’t connect with me properly until he aligned my root chakra.”
I wince. “Please tell me that’s not code for something else.”
“Oh, it was.” Viv’s voice is Sahara-Desert-dry. “But not in a fun way. He said my ‘energy body had walls.’ Then he asked if I wanted to do acro-yoga in the Whole Foods parking lot.”
Marin starts to chuckle, but a look from Viv causes her to stifle it down into a snort. How Viv can convey that much contempt through a web camera is a gift in and of itself. “You always find something wrong with them. Could it be because none of them is your husband?”
Viv doesn’t miss a beat. “No, it’s because none of them are sane. Also, I draw the line at doing downward dog over a cart corral.” Then her eyes soften. “And after each date, all I want to do is call him and laugh about it because he would understand…”
I let the moment settle, the image of Viv’s social profile splashing across my memory: ThisIsUs. No past tense. Viv’s silence lasts a second too long to be breezy, but she snaps back into her usual sparkle before anyone can call her on it. “Anyway, he refused to eat chocolate. Who doesn’t eat chocolate?”
“Speaking of chocolate…” I barrel ahead even though the segue makes zero sense. “I went down a Reddit rabbit hole the other night.”
“Oh, tell me it was the lumberjack one!” Viv sits up, suddenly alert, her chest practically spilling out of her off-the-shoulder top. “The guy who builds her a bookshelf and then slow-burns her into oblivion?”
“No, I didn’t finish it.”
Viv gasps. “Youbailedon social media’s hottest fictional contractor? The discussions happening on Reddit are enough to get your engine primed.”
My face reddens, and I look around the deserted street, despite the fact that no one can hear inside my headphones but me. “I took a detour. I found a post by a woman named Ginny. She was writing about a young friend of hers and some romance checklist the women at her assisted living home gave her. It was ridiculous. And kind of sweet. And weirdly inspiring.”
“I like weirdly inspiring.” Marin hasn’t picked up her knittingneedles again, so I’m counting this meeting as a win. “What did they do?”
“Well, the checklist was full of tropes. Like forced proximity, slow burns with emotional baggage, and forbidden workplace relationships. But the point wasn’t the romance. It was that these women wanted the girl to actuallylive, to stop hiding behind sarcasm and safety nets and take a chance on her one messy, beautiful, unpredictable life. And it made me think about us.”
Viv groans. “Here comes the homework.”
“Viv. It’s a grief group. Not homework. We should do things to process what’s happening.” I stop walking, the phone steady now as Frank lies down in a patch of clover.
“Fine. A romance checklist sounds fun,” Viv concedes.
I put down the camera to fiddle with the backpack I slung over my shoulder for this occasion. The hot pink, glitter-covered notebook stares back at me, and I wonder for the millionth time since grabbing it at the office supply store if I should’ve gone with the plain, black spiral one.
“We’re doing a list of double-dog-grief dares!” I yell it into the screen because right now, they’re both looking at the slightly overcast, pink Seattle sky.
I hear Viv’s voice echo out. “Dares? Like we did in middle school? Now sexy dares I can get behind. Tell me, Birdie. What romantic tropes do I get to play out, because there’s a hot young thing who started at my yoga class, and I can think of a few things I’d like to do with him and to him.”
I pick up my phone in time to see Marin’s knitting needles click together as her mouth forms a perfect, shocked O.
Before Marin can pretend her internet connection is unstable and end the call, I plow ahead. “Not like that. Not a sexy lumberjack dare.Griefdares. For each of us.”
Marin tilts her head, suspicion radiating from her face. “What kind of grief dares?”
“The kind that nudges you out of your stuck places. Things that scare you. Or stretch you. And here’s the kicker, we writethem for each other. I am putting each of your notebooks in this mailbox now.” I set the phone down again and let the loud creak of the mailbox speak for me before holding up the one I kept for myself. “We’re going fullSisterhood of the Traveling Pantsand writing one in each other’s notebooks before sending it on to the next person until it finds its way back to the original person. Then we complete the dare and pass them around again.”
Viv blinks. “Wait. Soyouget to writemine? And Marin writes yours? Wouldn’t it be easier to tell each other the dare?”
“That’s true,” Marin adds. “And save on postage.”
I sigh, saying goodbye to my traveling pants idea, and nod. “Fine. We can do it that way, but yes, we are still writing the dares for each other, and we are doing it in physical notebooks. The act of writing is therapeutic and all that.” I wave my hand and make the statement with authority of someone who doesn’t still avoid frozen waffles and knows how to process grief.
Viv narrows her eyes. “Now Marin writing one, I can handle. It will probably be something related to knitting needles. You, on the other hand, you’re probably going to make me go on a date with no makeup and talk about my feelings, aren’t you?”
