After a while Claudette stood up and went to the porch rail.
She stared at the black water for so long I thought maybe she had forgotten we were all there.
Then tears started running down her cheeks.
“I can hear them,” she whispered.
“The waves?”
She nodded. “They sound like applause.”
That week we did nothing important and everything meaningful.
We made breakfast together—real breakfasts, not polite continental arrangements. Eggs and grits and bacon and biscuits and fruit cut into bowls big enough for seconds. We walked the beach barefoot. We took photographs of each other. Not selfies. Proper photographs where one woman steps back, frames another in the light, and says, “No, baby, hold your chin up, there you go.”
Hattie sat in the sand and built a crooked sandcastle with her bare hands and laughed like a child. Pearl waded into the ocean on the second day and by the third was swimming badly but joyfully, coming up sputtering and shouting, “I am not afraid of anything anymore.” Rosalyn sang on the porch after dinner while two families walking by stopped on the boardwalk to listen. Claudette collected shells and arranged them on the kitchen windowsill every evening like a little altar to astonishment.
And every night, after supper, we lit a candle beside Samuel’s photograph.
Each woman said one thing she wished someone had told her when she was younger.
Hattie said, “You are allowed to stop giving.”
Ernestine said, “The right person won’t make you feel small.”
Claudette said, “You do not have to be strong all the time.”
Rosalyn said, “Silence is not peace. It’s just silence.”
Pearl said, “Grief doesn’t mean your life is over. It means your love was real.”
When it came to me, I looked at Samuel’s face in that picture, grinning in a house that wasn’t even finished yet, and I said, “You were never a burden. You were the reason.”
Nobody tried to improve on that.
On the last night we walked down to the shore after dinner.
The moon was full enough to silver the water. The tide came up around our ankles in cool folds. We stood in a line, six women who had each been abandoned or underestimated or used or taken for granted in one way or another, and we let the ocean move around us.
