Her phone buzzed. It was Jordan.
Good luck tonight. You’re going to be great.
She had told him about the pact. She’d told him about all of it over three different dinners and four coffees and a walk along the Battery that lasted over two hours and ended with him holding her hand. She had let him, which was the most significant physical contact Harper had had with another human since the polar plunge. And the polar plunge had been with the Atlantic Ocean.
If I say I did terribly, you are obligated to lie and say I was great.
I’ve never lied to you, and I’m not starting tonight, but you won’t be terrible.
Harper stared at the text and thought about the word never.
Jordan had never lied to her. He had never told her she was easy to love because she wasn’t. And they both knew it.
But what he had said four years ago, the night that she ended it, standing in his workshop in Mount Pleasant with sawdust on the floor and a half-finished rocking chair between them, was, “You’re worth the difficulty, Harper. I just wish you would believe that.”
She was trying to believe that. She was trying so hard to believe that.
The Laff Stop was located in a basement on King Street, where the smell of popcorn and sweat hung in the air. It was small. There were maybe eighty seats, and most of them were folding chairs that had seen better days. They were arranged in front of a stage that was the size of a closet, with a single microphone and a spotlight.
The walls were exposed brick, covered in framed headshots of comedians who had apparently performed here on the way to somewhere else. This definitely wasn’t a destination club.
The bar in the back served beer and wine, and something called a Laff Attack that looked like a margarita mixed with several other drinks.
Claire was already there, sitting at a table in the front with a notebook. Because, of course, Claire would bring a notebook. Claire had written her material on index cards, organized them by topic, and practiced them in front of her bathroom mirror.
Harper loved her level of preparation. She brought it to every activity that was supposed to feel like something you didn’t prepare for.
Nina arrived looking better than she had in months, better than she had even since the pact started. There was a quality to her that was hard to name. Not happiness, but more like presence. Like she was back. Like she had gone somewhere that grief had taken her, and she was now back home, fully.
She was wearing color, a deep blue top that wasn’t David’s.
“There are eight people signed up before us,” Claire said, looking at her notebook. “We are numbers nine, ten, and eleven. Average set is five minutes, so that gives us about forty minutes to prepare.”
“Forty minutes to sit here in absolute horrifying terror,” Harper said.
“Well, that too.”
“So what’s your material about?” Nina asked Claire.
Claire looked at her index cards. “Parenting, marriage, being a third-grade teacher who organizes her pantry for fun.”
“You’re using the pantry?”
“Well, the pantry’s funny. I organized it alphabetically, then by food group, and my husband never noticed either time. I think that’s pretty good material.”
“What about you?” Harper asked Nina.
Nina was quiet for a moment. “I’m going to talk about David.”
They all went still.
“I’m going to tell the story about the pelicans,” Nina said. “How he used to watch them fish and say they were proof you didn’t have to be graceful to be effective. And then the story about the time he tried to cook Thanksgiving dinner by himself and set off every single smoke detector in the house. And then the fire department came, and he offered them turkey.”
“He did not,” Harper said.
“He absolutely did. And the fire chief even stayed for pie.”
Harper bit the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. Nina was sitting in a comedy club talking about her dead husband, and she was glowing. Things sure had changed in the last few months.
