Jenni looked at her cocktail glass, now half-empty, the borage flower floating forlornly on the surface of the melted ice. “I’m practicing,” she said.
She carried the glass to the low-slung leather armchair facing the window, the one Mark had always hated because it faced away from the television. She sat, crossed her ankles, and took the first sip.
Jenni smiled. The old her, the pre-cocktail-hour her, would have panic-texted back immediately: Of course! Are you okay? Do you need me to drive up? What happened? She would have absorbed Chloe’s anxiety, made it her own, and spent the rest of the evening pacing the house in a state of low-grade hysteria. jenni lee afternoon cocktail
When the call ended, twenty-three minutes later, Chloe was laughing through her tears. “Mom,” she said. “You’re being weirdly calm. I like it.”
Jenni opened her eyes. The mountains were still there, the cicadas still singing. But now there was a tear tracing a cool path down her cheek. She didn’t wipe it away. The cocktail was not an escape from grief; it was a container for it. A small, beautiful glass in which she could hold the weight of missing her mother, missing her daughter, missing the woman she herself had been before marriage and mortgages had smoothed her into something softer and quieter. Jenni looked at her cocktail glass, now half-empty,
So she had invented the cocktail hour.
But the new Jenni Lee, the one who had just sipped a Bentonville Breeze and tasted her mother’s ghost, paused. She set the glass down. She looked at the mountains. She took a breath, and then another. Then she picked up the phone. She sat, crossed her ankles, and took the first sip
She wasn’t an alcoholic. She was a connoisseur of late afternoons.