She doubted it.
He would probably talk about the Braves.
Her third date was a woman who had accidentally ended up at the wrong table. She was looking for a trivia night that was happening in the front room. Claire pointed her in the right direction. They both laughed. And it was the most natural conversation she had all evening.
Claire loved trivia. She almost followed the woman into the other room.
Her fourth date was a man named Richard. He was a retired English professor.
He did have kind eyes and a nice sport coat with those cool patches on the elbows, but he also had that particular quality of attention that comes from spending decades listening to students talk about what they think a poem means.
He asked Claire what she liked to do. She opened her mouth to say what she always said: cooking, reading, and spending time with her family. You know, the menu of acceptable answers that you carry around.
She had done that for twenty-six years, the resume of a woman who had defined herself entirely by her relationship with other people.
Instead, she suddenly said, “I’ve started drawing again. I used to paint in college, and I stopped, and I just started drawing again a few months ago.”
He leaned forward, as if he were actually interested.
“What do you draw?”
“Waves mostly, the marsh, my friends sometimes.” She paused. “I’m not very good yet. I guess I’m relearning.”
“Well, relearning is the most interesting part of it,” he said. “It means you already know something, but now you’re choosing to know it differently.”
The bell rang. Richard smiled, tapped the table, and moved on.
Claire sat there for a moment, looking at the empty chair across from her.
She didn’t want Richard. She didn’t want Tom or Phil or any of the men who had rotated around her table for over an hour. She didn’t want someone new.
What she wanted was to sit across from someone, anyone, and say, “I’ve started drawing again.” And have that person lean forward, as Richard did, instead of shrugging, as Greg would likely do.
The problem wasn’t that she needed a different man.
The problem was that her own husband would have said, “Oh, that’s nice,” and then changed the subject.
But Richard, a total stranger, had leaned in.
That was the gap in her life. It was the whole thing. She didn’t want an affair. She didn’t want to have a crush on someone. She wasn’t someone who was going to take the avenue of betrayal.
She just now had the devastating clarity of realizing that a stranger in a sport coat with those cool elbow patches had shown more interest in her inner life in four minutes than Greg had shown in the last four years.
Harper was having a very different kind of night.
Claire could see her from across the room, about three tables away, sitting with her rigid posture, as if she were being questioned by the FBI under a bright light.
Most of her dates lasted the whole four minutes only because the bell hadn’t rung yet.
She was polite. She was efficient, as always. She was treating each conversation like an interview, which was exactly what she’d said it felt like and exactly how Harper handled it.
This is how she handled anything she couldn’t control: by controlling it so thoroughly that no actual connection could ever sneak through.
On her sixth or seventh rotation, something changed.
Claire noticed it because she was pretending to listen to this man named Gary, who was talking about his timeshare in Hilton Head, but she was actually watching Harper out of the corner of her eye.
She had no interest in Gary’s timeshare.
