“We were in my room, and the power went out. Do y’all remember this? Like the whole building was completely black. We just sat there in the dark, and we talked for hours.”
Harper remembered.
She remembered the three of them snuggled in on Claire’s narrow dorm room bed with a flashlight propped up on a pillow.
They had talked about what they wanted their lives to look like.
Claire wanted a house with a big wraparound porch and a husband who danced with her in the kitchen.
Nina wanted to travel, cook, and have a family that ate dinner together every night.
And Harper wanted to run something. She didn’t even know what it was. She just wanted to be in charge of something big and important. She wanted to be so good at it that nobody could ignore her.
In a way, they had all gotten what they wanted, all three of them.
But it had not looked at all the way they thought it would.
“You know, sometimes I think about that night and how young and sure we were of everything that was going to happen, as if we could just will it to be so.” She paused. “I was going to be an artist, remember?”
“You were good,” Nina said. “I mean, really, really good.”
“I was fine. As I got older, I guess I got more practical. Most people can’t make a living as a painter. I realized I needed to get realistic.”
“You got married, Claire. That was the end of your dreams. Happens to most married people. You pick a person, and you put your dreams away,” Harper said matter-of-factly.
Claire looked at her sideways, a small smile pulling at the corner of her mouth. She understood Harper’s sarcastic sense of humor.
For just a moment, Harper could see the twenty-year-old Claire beneath the fifty-year-old Claire, the girl who used to stay up until two in the morning, painting in the art building and coming home smelling of turpentine.
“You know, I haven’t held a paintbrush in twenty-seven years,” Claire admitted. “Think about that. Twenty-seven years that I’ve deprived myself of doing something that I used to love.”
The number hung between them like a heavy fog.
“David always said I should write a cookbook,” Nina said quietly. “His grandmother’s recipes, Elena’s recipes, all the food that I learned to make once I was in his family. He said I should write it all down. That way Lucia would have it one day, but I never did. I just kept saying I would get to it.”
“Well, you still could,” Harper said. “We’re not about to enter the nursing home, Nina.”
“I know. I keep telling myself that, but you know, there’s a difference between could and will. I’ve been stuck in could for my entire adult life.”
The porch went quiet again.
The frogs had resumed their concert and seemed to have invited more frogs to their band. A breeze came off the marsh, smelling of salt and jasmine.
Harper reached into her purse.
There was no warning that she was going to do it. She did not even know herself.
Her hand found the first pen she could, her Montblanc, the one she used to sign contracts at every meeting and to move millions from one column to another in a spreadsheet.
She picked up one of Claire’s dusty rose napkins from the table, the ones nobody had really noticed, the ones Claire had changed four times.
“What are you doing?” Claire asked.
“Something impulsive, which I would like to ask each of you not to hold against me later,” she said, waving her finger at them. “I’ve had quite a bit of wine. Just remember that.”
She uncapped the pen and wrote on the napkin in her sharp, slanted, professional handwriting.
The Pact.
