The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton

were so excited about going to the moon and we’d been up for hours anyway. Brett was the last to arrive, and we fell upon her like Noah must have fallen on dry land.
    “Eight days,” she said. “Splashdown, I said. Not launch. I still have eight days.”
    “Splashdown!” Ally said.
    “You better get going, honey,” Kath said, “’cause your own water’ll be splashing right down your skinny li’l legs before that capsule splashes into the ocean or I’ll choke down my best Derby hat!”
    The lunar landing was scheduled for Sunday, with the first lunar walk to be Monday morning. “The astronauts have eight hours of work after they land, before they can walk,” Brett said. “They land at three eastern time, and another eight hours is midnight—too late for the East Coast to see the walk on TV.”
    “You think all the Yankees in Manhattan wouldn’t be able to keep their li’l Yankee eyes open on a Sunday night for this?” Kath said.
    “They want the astronauts to get some rest first, too,” Brett said.
    “But they’ll be sitting on the
moon,
honey!” Kath said. “Can you imagine shutting your eyes for even one minute with your piggy toes dangling out over the moon? You put your chapter break anywhere you want to on this one, no one is turning out the light without turning the page.”
    We all watched the landing from our homes that Sunday: the cockpit alarm sounding constantly, and you could tell from the astronauts’ voices that they didn’t know what it was and they sure wanted to know. As that was sorted out (too many signals overloading the computer), they realized it was too rocky to land where they’d planned. They kept talking about how many seconds were left—“They’re running out of fuel,” Danny said—and finally they landed, just in time. When you read the reports of it, you imagine the first thing they said was, “Houston, Tranquility base here. The eagle has landed.” But it wasn’t actually the first thing they said. Just the most memorable. Which is something we remind ourselves when we’re critiquing: generally, dialogue shouldn’t be what people really say, but more like an edited version.
    Though that rule—like all writing rules—was made to be broken. The
un
edited version of what Blanche, Kath’s family’s cook back in Louisville, had to say about those men being on the moon? “They ain’t on no moon.” And when asked where she thought they were? “I don’t know, but they ain’t on no moon.” Sometimes real life hands you something you simply can’t improve upon.
    When we learned the lunar walk would be Sunday night after all—the NASA doctors had apparently come to the same conclusion Kath had—we all had the same thought:
Let’s watch together.
Ally already had plans to have dinner at her sister’s, but the rest of us pulled our half-cooked dinners out of our ovens, gathered our families, and hightailed it over to Linda’s. Impromptu potluck. We gathered in Linda’s living room, bouncing off the walls with excitement, and introduced our husbands, which was odder than I had imagined, meeting these three men I knew so well through their wives even though we’d never met. Lee was the most surprising to me; I’d pictured a much bigger man, maybe because he was Southern or because he was a doctor or because he was an adulterous bastard (goodness, did I say that?). I had never imagined he would be so charming, either—especially to Kath. Watching him bringing her tastes of all the desserts, and Anna Page sitting on his lap with the wildness seeping out of her almost the moment he wrapped his stocky arms around her, the sweetness filling in under the pretty straw hat that she kept on all evening, I saw why Kath thought he’d never leave his family.
    Danny and Chip hit it off immediately, both in their dark, unfashionable but indestructible glasses, both so smart in a way that most of us couldn’t really grasp, but there they were finishing each