Red wine arcs through the air like modern art. Emma yelps. The glass hits the coffee table, bounces once, and rolls under Michelle’s chair. Austen, undeterred, lands on the snacks with the grace of a bowling ball.
Crackers scatter. Grapes roll in every direction. The brie goes flying and lands, somehow, in Grandma Hensley’s lap.
“Austen!” Jessica lunges for the cat, who has already snagged his prize, a chunk of aged cheddar, and is bolting for the romance section.
“My notes!” Grandma Hensley holds up her cheese-splattered notepad. “This is a crime scene!”
“I’ll get paper towels,” Michelle says, already moving.
“Wine on my shirt,” Emma says, looking down at herself. “Great. This is very much how I wanted to make a first impression.”
“Trust me, this is tame,” Amber says. “Butterscotch, my cat, once knocked an entire cheese board onto the floor and then sat in the middle of it like he’d conquered a small nation.”
“Cats at book club are a menace,” Jo agrees. “But we love them anyway.”
“Do we?” Jessica returns, cat-less and defeated. “Because right now I’m questioning everything.”
“Where did he go?”
“Historical fiction. He likes the hardcovers. Better hiding spots.”
I’m laughing before I realize it. The whole scene is ridiculous with wine-splattered books, cheesecasualties, and Grandma Hensley dabbing at her notepad while muttering about “evidence preservation.” Somehow, it’s exactly what I needed.
“You okay?” Jo asks, sliding into the seat next to me while the others handle cleanup.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” I watch Emma trying to blot wine out of her shirt with a napkin while Michelle offers increasingly unhelpful suggestions. “She’s nice. Emma.”
“She is. And she’s got her own stuff going on. Which is probably good for you to see.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that everyone’s fighting their own battles. You’re not the only one who’s scared. You’re not the only one figuring it out as you go.” Jo squeezes my hand. “Levi’s going to LA. That’s real. But what you do with that fear is up to you.”
“What if I mess it up?”
“What if you don’t?” She smiles. “The book club heroine figured it out eventually. Maybe you will too.”
“That was fiction.”
“So? Fiction is just real life with better editing.”
The meeting breaks up slowly, the way all good book club meetings do.
Amber takes the leftover wine. Hazel takes thesalvaged cheese. Grandma Hensley takes her stained notepad and promises to “continue gathering intelligence.” Jessica coaxes Austen out of historical fiction with a treat shaped like a fish.
I help Emma clean wine off the chair she was sitting in, and we end up talking about photography, kids, and the strange experience of starting over in a place where you don’t know anyone.
“Can I ask you something?” I say.
“Sure.”
“The marina guy. Paul. You really don’t...?”
“No.” She says it too quickly. Then sighs. “I don’t know. He’s infuriating. He acts like I’m an inconvenience he has to manage. And every time I see him, we end up arguing about something stupid, like electrical panels or popsicles or whose kid ate whose snacks.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It is.” She pauses. “But also…I keep thinking about him? Which is annoying. I’ll be in the middle of editing photos and suddenly I’m replaying our last argument and thinking of better comebacks.”
