In big, bold letters.
“Oh, good Lord,” Nina said. “What kind of craziness are you concocting now?”
Harper kept writing.
“Number one. We do something every month that scares us. It can’t just be an inconvenience or a mild annoyance. It has to scare us.”
“Harper.” Claire said her name like a warning.
“Number two. It has to be something none of us has ever done before. So if you’ve already done it, it doesn’t count. It has to be genuinely new. And since the three of us have lived very small lives up until now, that shouldn’t be too hard.”
“Are you writing a contract on my napkin?”
“Number three. We have to do it together. All three of us. No backing out. No excuses. No, I have a headache, or I have a meeting, or I need to reorganize my pantry.”
“I reorganized that pantry one time, and I’ll never live it down.”
“It was alphabetical, Claire.”
“Well, alphabetical is a valid system.”
Harper held the napkin in the air. It felt almost official, but mostly ridiculous. Again, wine was involved.
“One year,” she said. “Twelve months, twelve adventures, and we take turns picking. And it has to scare all three of us. And nobody can quit.”
Nina stared at the napkin as if it might bite her. “But everything scares me. I’m scared of my own mailbox. Trust me, for me, the bar is extremely low.”
“Good, then you’ll have plenty of options.”
“What if one of us picks something that’s genuinely dangerous?” Claire asked. “Like bungee jumping or swimming with sharks or eating that sushi down at the gas station on the corner?”
“Well, then we die doing something interesting for the first time in years,” Harper said, shrugging.
“Okay, that’s definitely not comforting.”
“It’s not supposed to be comforting. It’s supposed to be a wake-up call. We’ve been stuck in our lives for years, and now we’re a half a century into this thing. It’s time to shake it up!”
Harper looked at her friends. Claire had her flour-dusted hands folded in her lap. Nina was wearing her dead husband’s sweater, trying desperately just to feel something, anything.
And then there was herself, Harper Ellis, fifty years old, vice president of a division that generated more revenue than most companies, eating toast over the sink five nights a week because setting a table for one person felt like the ultimate defeat.
“Look, we’re three intelligent, interesting, capable women,” Harper said. “We’re currently living as if we decided the good part of our lives is over. And I refuse to accept that. I refuse to think that fifty means we’re done.”
“Okay, I need a system,” Claire said.
“Of course you do.”
“I mean, like a rotation. I pick one month, you pick one month, Nina picks one month, and then we cycle around. Four rounds of three.”
“Is it going to have to be color-coded?” Harper asked, rolling her eyes.
“Do not test me.”
Nina had not said a word. She was just staring at the napkin in Harper’s hand.
“You know, David would have loved this,” she finally said. “He would have made such a spreadsheet, and it would have been color-coded by difficulty level. He was such a nerd.”
“He was the best nerd,” Claire said. “He would have signed that napkin so fast that the ink would not have even been dry.”
