“Abuela,” Lucia said, “you screamed when you saw a lizard on your windshield last week.”
“It was a very large lizard. I saw teeth. I swear it!”
The porch erupted in laughter.
Greg leaned over to Claire. “I want to come, too, to the next one, whatever it is.”
Claire looked at her husband, at his face in the porch light, older and kinder, at his hand on the arm of the rocking chair.
She reached for it.
“Okay,” she said.
The porch light on Nina’s house glowed warm against the Edisto dark. And inside, a framed napkin hung on the wall, faded and worn, bringing together the people who were already planning what came next.
EPILOGUE
The napkin now lived on Claire’s wall, not the kitchen wall or the fridge where it had spent the first year, held up by a magnet, getting splashed by the dishwasher or bumped by grocery bags.
It had graduated.
Claire had taken it to a frame shop on Bay Street to get a proper frame, the same street where Nina’s favorite bakery had reopened. A woman named Diane put it under glass in a simple white frame, handling it with care.
The frame hung in Claire’s studio.
It was still technically the guest room. It still had a bed that was pushed against the wall to make room for her easel and supply table.
There were seven paintings hanging on the wall now. The abstract from the class with its brave, messy colors; a watercolor of the Beaufort waterfront at sunrise; a small oil painting of their matching tattoos; a sketch of the view from the rock-climbing wall; and a painting of Hank’s that she’d started from the photograph.
Two more were still in progress. One was the marsh at dawn, her version, different from Nina’s. The other she hadn’t named yet. It was just a painting of a porch light at night, three shapes in the chairs. It could have been any porch. It could have been every porch.
The room still smelled like turpentine and linseed oil.
The smell made Claire feel twenty years old and fifty-one at the same time, which was the best way to feel, rooted in who you’ve been, but present in who you are, and curious about who you’d be next.
It was Saturday morning in November, one month after the birthday party, two months after the skydive, and thirteen months since Harper had pulled out a pen and written on a napkin.
Claire stood in her studio, looking at the napkin on the wall.
She could hear Greg in the kitchen. He was making breakfast. He did this on Saturdays now, a routine that had started with the disastrous stir-fry, but had evolved with improvements and one small kitchen fire.
Now it was eggs, toast, and coffee, and the toast was only slightly too dark. The coffee was good, and the eggs were scrambled the way Claire liked them, because she had told Greg how she liked them, and he had remembered.
He remembered.
That was the new thing about Greg. He remembered things. Not all the time, and not perfectly. Sometimes he still forgot to take out the recycling, or he watched the Braves with more enthusiasm than he watched anything else. And sometimes he still retreated to the den on the evenings when the world felt like too much.
But he kept asking her questions.
He asked about the paintings, what her friends were up to, and who was coming over for dinner. He asked Claire about her day and actually waited for the answer.
They were not fixed. Claire didn’t believe any marriage was ever fixed. She believed they were construction sites.
That was the metaphor she’d used at Dr. Warren’s office.
Construction sites and marriages were messy, loud, and full of things that might fall on your head, but they had a blueprint now, and they were both reading it.
Some days were good, and some days were hard.
