“We were there because you built the table,” Nina said. “Literally. You set this table. You made the dinner. You changed the napkin color four times. If you hadn’t made that birthday dinner perfect, we wouldn’t have ended up on the porch. And the porch is where everything started.”
“Those napkins were a very aggressive salmon,” Harper said.
“They were dusty rose. The original choice was salmon.”
“You told us it looked like the cafeteria.”
“The original original choice was coral, which also looked like salmon.”
“Different salmon.”
“The coral was sophisticated salmon, and the second one was hospital salmon.”
“Claire, all salmon is the same salmon.”
“That is terribly false, and I will die on that hill.”
Nina was laughing, lying on the blankets with a wine glass balanced on her stomach. She was laughing about an argument over the color of salmon and the particular insanity Claire had of caring so deeply about napkin colors that she had to change them four times. The napkin story was something she could listen to over and over, although it didn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. But it did matter. The napkins mattered. All those details mattered.
Claire’s obsessive, meticulous, beautiful attention to little things was not a flaw. It was a gift. It was the same gift that had made that birthday dinner so perfect and the karaoke song list so organized. It was the gift that gave them matching bathing suits. Claire Morrison noticed things that other people walked right past. She made them beautiful, and the world was better for it.
The wine ran out. They didn’t open another bottle. They just lay on the floor of Claire’s living room, three women on the eve of their last adventure.
“Are you scared?” Claire said. “About tomorrow?”
“Terrified,” Harper said.
“Yeah, completely and totally terrified,” Nina replied.
“Good,” Claire said. “That’s the whole point of all of this, right? To finish by doing one of the scariest things we can imagine? To prove that we’re different now?”
“I just hope we’re not three flat pancakes by lunchtime,” Harper said, closing her eyes and pretending to pray.
Surprisingly, they all fell asleep on the floor. Not all at once, of course. Nina first, because Nina always fell asleep first. Claire second, her sketchbook open on the blanket next to her, a pencil still dangling in her hand. Harper last, because Harper was always last. She was the one who always kept watch, always made sure everyone else was safe before she allowed herself to close her eyes.
The house settled around them. The candles burned low and went out. Crickets and frogs made sounds in the distance. The napkin sat on the coffee table in the dark, faded and worn.
Tomorrow, they would carry it to the airfield, put it in one of their pockets, and jump.
And whatever happened after that would be their next thing, and then the next thing after that, because the pact had never really been about just twelve adventures. It had been about learning to say yes, and they had all learned that lesson very well.
They didn’t need courage anymore.
In the morning, the sun would come up over the marsh, and those three women would wake up, stiff and sore from sleeping on the living room floor. They would drink too much coffee.
They would drive to an airfield, hands shaking, and step out of an airplane. The world would be bigger from up there than any of them could imagine, but that was tomorrow. Tonight, they slept, together on the floor like they were at a middle school slumber party, the way that they used to sleep in their dorm at the College of Charleston, tangled up in comfy blankets, safe in each other’s company, dreaming about whatever comes next.
CHAPTER 18
The plane was yellow, but not a comforting shade. It wasn’t like school bus yellow or the bright yellow of a sunny day. It certainly wasn’t the cheerful, vintage kitchen wall yellow from the ‘70s. Instead, it was a color that seemed to say, ‘I was painted this way so you can spot me in a field if something goes wrong.’ The small plane looked loud and neglected, sitting on the Skydive Lowcountry tarmac like a toy left outside too long. It would carry them 14,000 feet into the sky, and then, like some fools, they would just jump right out.
Nina stood on the tarmac, looking at the plane. “We have done karaoke, polar plunges, cooking classes, rock climbing, tattoos, road trips, speed dating, grief retreats, stand-up comedy, and horseback riding. We’ve signed a napkin and kept our word to each other. And now this small yellow machine is going to take us up, and we are willingly going to jump to our deaths.”
The napkin was in her pocket. She had taken it from Claire’s coffee table that morning, folded it carefully, and put it in the breast pocket of the jumpsuit they had given her at check-in. The jumpsuit was neon green so she could be found in a field if something went wrong. It was very important to have visibility after a disaster. Claire’s was orange and Harper’s was blue.
The morning had started at Claire’s house with way too much coffee and not enough breakfast. They had all woken up on the living room floor, stiff-backed, as expected. The aching necks were a little much, though. Fifty-year-old women should not sleep on hardwood floors, and they were now remembering why they didn’t do it anymore.
Claire had made coffee. Harper had complained about her spine. Nina had eaten a banana, just stared out the window, and thought about David, Sam, Lucia, and Elena. She thought about the letter she’d written at the grief retreat and about the boots that were still at the back door of her cottage. But then she had put on her shoes and gotten into the car.
