The Celebrants


 
 
 
 Also by Steven Rowley
 
 The Guncle
 The Editor
 Lily and the Octopus
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 G. P. Putnam’s Sons
 Publishers Since 1838
 An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
 penguinrandomhouse.com
 
 Copyright © 2023 by Ten Wry Wolves, Inc.
 Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.
 Library of Congress Control Number: 2023933983
 Hardcover ISBN: 9780593540428
 International ISBN: 9780593714478
 Ebook ISBN: 9780593540442
 Cover illustration: Sandra Chiu
 Cover design: Tal Goretsky
 Book design by Kristin del Rosario, adapted for ebook by Maggie HunT
 Interior Art: Sun Over Mountains © Miloje / Shutterstock.com
 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 pid_prh_6.0_143797783_c0_r1
 
 
 
 For Stephanie Chernak Maurer and the Sixth Floor
 
 
 
 
 “Life is what you celebrate. All of it. Even its end.”
 —Joanne Harris, Chocolat
 
 
 
 
 
 
 YESTERDAY ONCE MORE
 (Jordan, 2023)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 He was an astronaut, he imagined, like in one of those movies; his mission took him to a distant planet on the far reaches of the solar system, Saturn, perhaps, or Neptune. He was gone a nominal amount of time—three years, maybe five, significant but not interminable—but somehow everyone Jordan Vargas knew on Earth had aged a lifetime while he was in space. Naomi with her readers, struggling to figure out the television’s remote as if the technology had eluded her, her irritated face twisted in frustration. Craig in the kitchen employing the flashlight on his phone to read take-out menus, muttering the whole time about the Big Sur retreat’s soft ambient light while confusing yellow curry with green. What was the difference? The color, yes, obviously. But one had more turmeric. What the hell color is turmeric? Marielle educating them in great detail about the kittens she’d brought for the weekend. They were born without eyes, a condition called microphthalmia, she explained, caused by a genetic mutation that can sometimes result in smaller-than-usual tongues. And Jordan Tosic, loyal Jordy, his husband and other half, the man who made them the Jordans to so many. (Should we invite the Jordans? You don’t know the Jordans?! We love the Jordans!) Jordy’s metamorphosis, like Jordan’s own, was less shocking, as they’d been together since college and had witnessed each other aging slowly, each having had ample time to adjust to the other’s weathering like the wearing of a beloved chair’s upholstery over time.
 Of course Jordan Vargas wasn’t an astronaut, or anything close to it. He was a public relations executive, bound to Earth by gravity, a mortgage, a business he owned with his husband, and aging immigrant parents who moved the family from Bogotá when Jordan was eight to give him and his brother a better life. He was someone who vibrated not from sitting above liquid-fuel cryogenic rocket engines aboard a shuttle ready to launch, but with the genuine thrill of securing his clients ample media coverage. Or at least he used to, until slowly over the years he came to resent both the clickbaitification of journalism and the troublesome clients whom he saw more as crises than people. And it wasn’t space travel that kept him away from these friends, a dangerous mission (as poetic as it might be to imagine), so much as his own busy life and the sad fact that friends—even best friends of thirty years—drift apart.
 Jordan was growing impatient with Craig’s inability to read a simple take-out menu. They were only in Big Sur for the long weekend; their time together, as always, was limited. He rolled up one of Mr. Ito’s old National Geographic magazines stuffed in a rack next to him and, from the recliner where he sat, swatted the coffee table. “Jesus, Craig. How old are you?”
 Craig sighed his displeasure.
 Naomi peered over her glasses. “Don’t do that to my father’s magazines.”
 Cowed, Jordan rolled the publication the opposite way to flatten it. “Will someone help Nana with the menu? I’m famished.”
 “I just need to turn on some lights.” Craig ran his hand against the dated backsplash in search of a light switch, managing only to trigger the garbage disposal instead.
 “I told you. All the lights are already on.” Naomi strained to open the remote, but the plastic latch was stuck. Her mother would use a dime to open battery compartments, but no one carried coins anymore.
 “I’ll help,” Marielle offered. “My eyes are still young.” She was also the youngest by a year, having skipped a grade somewhere, the only one of them yet to turn fifty. Her hair was untamed, an ashen blond with streaks of gray, and only a delicate whisper now of its former red. Of the five of them, she had updated her style the least, and she looked much like the lone female member of a once-popular folk trio—all she was missing was a tambourine.
 “There’s nothing wrong with my eyes. It’s the light,” Craig groused.
 “It’s not the light,” Naomi insisted.
 Jordy chuckled. “Unlike the cats.”
 “There’s nothing wrong with their eyes,” Marielle admonished, fussing over the laundry basket at her feet she’d requisitioned to make the kittens a nest. “It’s just they don’t have any.”
 Jordan looked up at Craig. “Toss me your phone.”
 “I only have one bar.” The cell reception at the house was almost nonexistent.
 “I didn’t ask you how many bars you