Grace tells the girls at dinner.
She promised she’d tell Lee first, but she wants to gauge their reactions before she tells Lee. They will be her trial run. They can give her advice. She wanted to tell them while shopping, when they’d stopped at Hole for donuts and coffee, but the timing hadn’t felt right. Now, when Lee excuses herself to FaceTime with Mason, she releases all of it in a quick rush. Carol and Alice look at each other, wine stems in hand, truly shocked.
“Wait, wait, wait.” Carol waves her hands. “How did we not know?”
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Alice asks, swirling her wine in a nervous frenzy.
“And why haven’t you told Lee?” Carol’s eyes widen.
Grace pinches a piece of fresh, warm bread and pops it into her mouth. “I wanted to. For months. Trust me. But I also wanted to see for myself first … to make sure it was real.”
“Are you going to tell her tonight?” Carol asks.
“You have to,” Alice says. “She needs to know.”
Grace cringes but nods. “I am. I just wanted to tell you first so that you can make sure she doesn’t murder me while I sleep.”
“Oh stop. She’ll be fine,” Carol insists.
“And we’re happy for you.” Alice pats her hand affectionately.
“Really? I’m not the worst friend ever?”
Carol rolls her eyes. “Oh, please. Hardly.”
“However it ends up, thanks for making this trip a hell of a lot more interesting,” Alice says as Lee returns to the table.
“Sorry. What did I miss?”
Grace almost chokes on her bread and raises her glass in a toast. “To real friends,” she says.
“To real friends,” they echo as they clink their crystal against hers.
Tonight, she will tell Lee, and then it will all be over. There will be no more secrets.
After dinner, the women pile into Carol’s rental and drive the fifteen minutes back to Arbor House. Marge is waiting out front. They cluster together, somehow wondering if they are in trouble.
“Ladies, may I?” Marge ushers them to the back deck. A blazing fire pit, a tray of graham crackers, squares of expensive dark chocolate, homemade marshmallows, skewers, two bottles of wine, and freshly folded blankets are artfully arranged around each of the chaises.
“Marge, are you serious right now?” Alice exclaims. “This is amazing!”
“You ladies enjoy, and just let me know what else you need.” Marge pulls the back door closed. They each grab a blanket and get cozy under the stars.
“Okay, this is pretty divine,” Carol says.
“Beyond,” Alice adds.
Grace claims the chair beside Lee and relishes the night sky.
“Thank you for convincing me to come,” Lee finally says. “Really. I would have been so sad to miss this. I didn’t know how much I needed to get away.”
Carol leans forward and cups her hand around her ear. “What was that?”
Lee stretches her legs in front of her and takes another bite of her s’more. “I said, thank you. You were right. Don’t be an ass about it.”
“That would mean she’d have to be someone other than herself,” Grace jokes.
“Wow.” Carol tosses a piece of graham cracker at her. “Let’s dump on the organizer. Fine.”
“We love you,” Lee says. “But you are a total control freak.”
“It got us here, didn’t it?” Carol nibbles sticky marshmallow from her finger.
“The s’mores are a nice touch, I have to admit,” Grace says, trying to distract herself from what’s to come, from what she has to say.
“I have an idea.” Alice chews and swallows, making brief eye contact with Grace. “Let’s all go around and tell each other something we don’t know. Kind of like Truth or Dare. Without the dares.”
The confession snags in Grace’s stomach and flips. Here we go.
“How about no?” Lee scoffs.
“Oh, come on,” Carol says. “It will be fun.”
“Why don’t you start?” Grace asks. She needs time to formulate how she will say it. Where she will even begin.
“How about Alice starts? Since it’s her game.”
Alice sits up straighter. “Fine.” She clears her throat. “I think I’ve decided to turn my nonprofit into a for-profit business. With Fred as my manager.”
“Whoa,” Grace says, genuinely surprised. “A, that’s an amazing idea.”
“Do you think you and Fred will kill each other?” Carol asks.
Alice shrugs and twists the cap off the first bottle of red. “Probably. But I’m not going to ‘Alice’ the situation and freak out. I can handle this.”
“Did you just use your name as a verb?” Carol laughs.
Alice tosses the cap at her. “You go.”
Carol catches it and looks at Grace. “No, why don’t you go?”
“Because I’m not ready yet,” Grace says, an edge to her voice.
“I just thought the older and wiser one would want to go next.” Carol shrugs.
“Ha-ha,” Grace says. “Asshole.”
“Stop calling me that!” She launches an entire cracker, and Grace lifts her blanket to shield herself from it. The cracker breaks apart and scatters crumbs along the deck.
“Guys, we can’t make a mess,” Lee whispers.
“She started it,” Carol says around a mouthful of s’more. “But fine, I’ll go.”
Grace resituates herself under her blanket. Her heart is a jackhammer, and she takes long, slow breaths as she waits for Carol.
“Mine’s not good, I’m afraid.”
“What do you mean?” Lee asks. “Is it Zoe?”
“No, it’s my mom.”
“Did she call you an asshole too?” Grace jokes.
Carol smiles and swirls her wine. “I wish. Turns out she has stage-four breast cancer. She just told me a few days ago.”
Grace sits up. “My God, Carol. You mean when she called in the park last week…”
“Yep. Totally legitimate. I just assumed she was being her normal paranoid self. But you know how my mother is. I want to make sure she’s actually stage four and not, you know, cancer-free, as she very well could be.”
“Oh God, now I’m the asshole. I’m so sorry.”
“You’re fine.” She dismisses Grace’s apology with her hand. “It will be fine.”
“But we all heard her on the phone that day,” Alice says, “and it all seemed so trivial.”
“Well.” Carol shrugs. “It wasn’t.”
“Cheryl seems like she’ll live forever,” Lee murmurs.
“She does. But after Dad died…”
Grace sits forward and touches Carol’s knee. “Please let us know how we can help. You know we’re here for anything.”
“I can’t think of anyone better to have in her corner though,” Alice says. “You’re the most devoted daughter I know. Your love coupled with your affinity for research will have her cured in no time.”
“Ha. I’m sure she’ll still find some way to annoy the piss out of me until the end of time.” Carol clears her throat and glances at Grace, but she shakes her head. I’m still not ready.
“So, since we’re all revealing our deepest, darkest secrets…?” Carol turns to Lee.
Lee shifts in her chair. “What?”
“Oh, come on. You know what everyone wants to know,” Alice urges.
“I don’t get to pick what I tell you?” Lee rearranges herself under the blanket.
“We’re dying to know,” Carol says.
“What, how I wake up looking like this?” Lee laughs.
Grace knows she needs to interject. It’s her turn. This is about her, not Lee. She should have told Lee separately and not gotten Carol and Alice involved in the first place.
“Come on.”
“Come on what?” Lee’s voice hardens.
“Who is it?” Alice asks. “Who’s Mason’s dad?”
Despite what Grace has to tell her, she pauses. It’s the one thing Lee has never revealed. With Alice’s and Carol’s confessions, maybe tonight is the night Lee will come clean.
Lee closes her eyes. She opens them after a long, uncomfortable moment and blinks into the fire. “No one.”
“Are you, like, the Virgin Mary?” Alice jokes.
“Was it a sperm donor?” Carol offers.
“No one is judging you here. Believe me,” Alice says. “We all have shitty sex stories.”
Lee watches the fire, seemingly haunted. Grace leans forward. “Lee? Are you okay?”
She shakes her head. “I’m fine. It’s just … not a good memory, you know?” She searches for something to say.
Grace clears her throat and looks around the group. “I’ll go.”
Lee looks relieved, but Grace dreads what’s coming. How it will change their relationship. How Lee will look at her. The exact moment their friendship will shift. She calculates all the ways to begin. When it started. What it was like the first time. How it got from there to here.
“Will you hold that thought? I’m dying to pee.” Lee’s blanket pools at her feet as she disappears inside to the bathroom.
The girls lean forward once she’s out of earshot. “Just tell her,” Carol hisses. “Get it over with.”
“I’m trying! I can’t stop her from needing to pee.”
Alice grabs Carol’s forearm. “Maybe we should give them privacy. So Lee doesn’t feel pressure to respond in a certain way.”
Grace knows Carol wants to stay. She wouldn’t miss a good bit of drama for anything, but she reluctantly nods. “Fine. Have at it.” The women say good night and toss the empty bottle of wine into the recycling bin, the second one unopened by Carol’s lounge chair. “Good luck.”
They head inside. Grace takes a staggering breath as she waits for Lee to come back out.
It’s finally time.