Chapter 5
ALEC
“You sure about this, son?” Dad asked, looking as if he wasn’t certain what his feelings were on the matter.
“You should have waited to sign up for the matching service,” Mom said firmly. “Taken the job and training and seen if you liked it up there. What happens if you don’t and you’ve gone and gotten yourself an alien husband?”
“Perfect match means I’d like it just fine,” I countered.
“And you believe that’s true and not just propaganda?” she pressed, wringing her hands.
“I do,” I replied firmly.
“All those people coming and going, and their families down here, if it wasn’t we’d have heard about it some which way,” Dad pointed out.
“I know, I know, it’s just that it’s one thing to believe when it’s someone else and not your child,” she sniffled.
I wrapped my arms around her, giving her a hug that was to reassure myself as much as it was her. “I’m not a kid anymore,” I reminded her. “Not for a long time now.”
“You’ll always be my baby boy,” she replied, hugging me tightly back. “Feels like it was only last week you were that little boy picking dandelions and handing them to me as the finest bouquet. Then I blinked, and you were a man.”
Dad sighed. “Time moves so fast once you have children. And you’re right, you’re a grown man, and if we did our job right, you know what you’re doing, and we should be supportive.”
“Thanks, Dad. I’m just taking Floof and my clothes and a few pictures.”
Mom let go of me and took a step back. “So you’re not moving completely out?”
I smiled at her. “I’ll need a place to stay when visiting, right?”
“Like when we thought he’d be home on leave from the Army,” Dad added.
I winced, but quickly smoothed over my expression so they’d not see how much that failure still poked at me, no matter how unjustified that was. Besides, he wasn’t wrong.
“Just like that,” I confirmed.
Mom nodded, then pressed her lips together in thought. “If you get matched, we’ll need to get you a bigger bed in there.”
I blinked.
“Shirl, let’s not get ahead of ourselves there,” Dad said, his expression mirroring my own sudden feeling of embarrassment.
Mom waved her hand. “You’re right. I heard that if it says you’re a match, you’re already married by their laws, but get to have a wedding and honeymoon. You’ll need to call me immediately so I can sort out tunes and find you a place."
Dad and I stared at her in disbelief as she moved so swiftly from being sad her baby was grown up and going into space to work to deciding I was obviously going to be one of the rare matches and starting wedding plans.
She clapped her hands together. “I know! You can get married here in our yard! The honeysuckle is blooming, and you can stand under the arch! We’ll just livestream it for anyone who can’t come on such short notice.
I can make a 2 tier cake and put a topper on it, and we can have cake and punch afterwards, and then Dad and I can take you both out to The Olive Garden.
” She smiled triumphantly. “It won’t be anything fancy, but then that’s never been our style. ”
“Shirl, that arch is over the front gate! We can’t ask them to stand in the gateway!
” Dad’s flabbers were well past being ghasted.
Mine weren’t, as Mom had come up with such doozies over the years.
Like the time she up and decided to buy a plastic kiddie pool to throw me a pool party, when I was 12.
Dad ended up saving the day by getting some rubber ducks and rigging it up like a carnival game, as well as setting up a corn hole set and a few other outdoor games he could spin as being on theme. “As for the restaurant-”
“The Olive Garden’s fine,” I hurriedly interjected. It was Mom’s favorite restaurant, and she was right - I didn’t like fancy pants. A delicious family meal, somewhere we had many happy memories together, was a wonderful way to start.
“Fine,” Dad mumbled. “But I stand by what I said about the gate.”
“The few guests can come in through the drive,” Mom declared. “We can go to the garden shop and pick up a planter with a trellis behind it and dress it up with a bunch of fake ivy. That gives it a backdrop and blocks the gate.”
“The guests will all be facing the street and the neighbors’ houses there.”
“So we’ll need to measure and get some more trellis planters and maybe some fake flowering trees,” she mused.
I knew this was a lost cause, and to be fair, if I did get matched, I wouldn't have cared if we had a human type ceremony or not, except for how important it was to her. So, she could arrange whatever, and we’d figure out how to make it work.
Besides, no matter how much I might wish otherwise and dream of finding that special forever guy, the odds were higher that I’d win a triple roll over Lotto jackpot after stopping to buy a ticket at random and letting the machine pick the numbers for a single row.
I pointed my thumb over my shoulder. “I’m just going to go sort out what I want to pack.”
Dad sighed. “I’ll go find where Floof’s carrier got put in the garage after we put the tree and stuff back in there after Christmas.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I called over my shoulder, my feet already taking me towards my room.
“I’m going over to Judy’s,” Mom said. “She makes cards. I bet she could whip up invitations just fine.”
I only hoped that when I didn’t get matched this afternoon, she wouldn’t be too disappointed, as she seemed really invested in that a lot more than my job. Or maybe not.
“And if you’re not matched, some nice notecards I can send out telling everyone about you getting into that program. Everyone knows the Mylos provide an elite education, and their job benefits are literally out of this world.”
I chuckled under my breath. Yeah, okay. I’d give her that one.