Chapter Three
Three
WHEN I STEPPED into the sanctuary to take my dad’s arm, my dad wasn’t there.
Of course.
It was my Grandma Dodie instead. Standing proud for duty at five-two.
Had I been foolishly thinking that my dad would show up for the most important day of my life? That was on me.
What was I, a beginner? My money should’ve been on Dodie from the start.
She held out her elbow gallantly when she saw me—cute as a dumpling with her little white halo of hair.
I took her arm, but I had to stoop a little.
I smiled big at the whole sanctuary of guests who had turned to gaze at me as I whispered, “Where’s Dad?”
“He missed his flight,” Grandma Dodie whispered back, the same way.
“Of course he did,” I said, brightening my smile.
“He’s hoping to make the reception,” she offered.
“Don’t bet on it.”
Now I was itchy and angry.
Typical. My absentee dad. He had one job—and now my grandma was doing it.
Per usual.
He’d already missed the rehearsal dinner. He’d missed 90 percent of the first-ever brunch with the Richmonds, too—taking a work call ten minutes in and then pacing around a side garden on his cell for the rest of the meal.
Not to mention he kept calling them the Richlands.
None of this was shocking. He was a vestigial parent, after all.
He had three children, and he could barely keep them all straight.
He didn’t know our birthdays. He always mixed up what schools we went to.
He consistently got our ages wrong. It was a parlor game at this point: quizzing our dad on basics he should already know and then triumphing as he got every one wrong.
If you can really call moments like that “triumphs.”
Anyway, it was fun, in a way. He deserved it.
Ashley once dared him to say our middle names—and he missed all three, while our mom looked on, her head tilted in wonder.
For Ashley, he tried Elizabeth, Isabel, and Henrietta before my mom finally cut in with, “It’s Rose, sweetheart.
After your mother.” I got Martha, Bonnie, and Julia before we explained that mine was Dorothy, after Grandma Dodie—my mom’s mom.
For our brother, Pete, he insisted on the very random name Timothy for a while before trying a whole host of others like it was a literal guessing game—“Miles? Franklin? Steven? Paul?”—until Pete finally put him out of his misery and said, “It’s Raleigh, Dad. After you.”
My father wouldn’t retain this education, of course. None of it would stick.
In six months we could do it all again, no problem.
We were like the idea of a family to him—more than we were real people.
It was fine. It was funny at this point.
“Don’t worry about it,” my mom always said. “He’s a good provider.” Then she’d wink at us and say, “And you hit the jackpot with your mom.”
We’d hit the jackpot with Grandma Dodie, too, who was seventy-eight years old and feistier than the whole lot of us put together.
She lived with us now, and she was cultivating antique roses in the side yard, and taking an art history class on the Impressionists, and baking her own sourdough every week.
She’d founded an old lady workout group called the Screaming Mimis that walked three miles every day.
She had a whole crew of travel friends who had nursed their husbands through long, final illnesses and were “ready to have some fun”—and they went to see Broadway shows, and took riverboat cruises, and spent random weekends in Marfa, Texas, drinking Tito’s and tonic at the hotel where they’d filmed Giant.
Even right now, walking the aisle, Grandma Dodie was moving faster than I was.
“We’re supposed to go slow, Dodie,” I whispered. “Mrs. Richmond wants the processional music to finish.”
“Nonsense,” Dodie said. “I’ll be in a coma in the nursing home before we’re halfway there.”
I didn’t argue. The sooner I got out of this gown, the better.
Which prompted me to notice, a little late, that the whole time I’d been talking to Cooper … I hadn’t been itching.
Like, at all.
I’d totally forgotten to itch.
But now, as I walked the aisle like a plank, the itching was back—times ten.
By the halfway point, I had to lock my elbow and make a fist to keep from scratching my neck. You know when something itches so bad you would happily claw off all your own skin just to make it stop?
It was like that.
Down at the end, a million miles away, was Pearce. Waiting. In a tux. A tux he owned. Because he was the kind of guy who owned a tux—and the studs and cuff links to go with it.
Pearce had been a math major like me. We got together in college after a blind date where we ate sushi, talked about math all night, and then walked back to my dorm.
Never underestimate the power of talking about something you love with a fellow lover of that same thing.
I honestly think he seduced me by talking about differential equations.
Even though, looking back, we came at math from different angles. I liked the challenge of how to make the complexity of it more accessible. Pearce, I think, was the opposite. He liked how the complexity of it made him look smart. So much smarter than everybody else.
Our shared language was math—but we spoke different dialects.
Either way, though, it felt a lot like love.
Pearce did not kiss me when he dropped me off that first night, but he did say, and this is verbatim: “I really enjoyed our time together. Let’s do this again sometime.”
Who talks like that? Right?
I agree that it doesn’t seem to add up. Why would a winsome young mathematician like myself embark on what turned into a seven-year relationship that started with such a whimper?
Because of my fraught relationship with my absentee father, obviously. Pearce turned out to be the perfect man for all my unresolved issues.
And when I say “perfect,” what I mean is: He was the perfect ratio of interested to disinterested. He liked me enough to make me chase him, but not enough to let me catch him.
And that’s the whole trick to dating me, it turns out: Make me want you, but don’t let me have you.
As soon as you’re mine, I will lose interest. Guaranteed.
It’s a problem.
I’d dumped every boyfriend I’d ever had—except for Pearce. I was always the dumper, never the dumpee. But then Pearce came along. And he was so minimally interested in me that I had no choice but to get obsessed with him.
At dinner, he’d check his phone. At movies, he’d fall asleep. Texts were responded to sporadically. Invitations were deferred. Frequency was infrequent—because, for Pearce, seeing each other once a week was more than enough.
If he stayed over, he was out the door by six AM.
I hated it, but it worked. You can’t argue with the results.
Not getting enough made me want more. Being with Pearce was the emotional equivalent of being ravenously hungry and then eating one Pringle.
I knew the pattern. I knew the only way to stay interested was to stay unsatisfied.
But I still wanted to get … satisfied.
But he wouldn’t satisfy me. Or couldn’t.
It was the worst relationship of my life. And the longest.
I stayed in a state of suspended dissatisfaction for three long years until finally, one day not long before we graduated, as I was bemoaning my fate to my mom on a video call—she just … solved it.
“I’m terrified that if he ever really gives me what I want, I’ll lose interest,” I said.
My mother looked at me over her readers. “Well,” she said. “You know what the answer to that is.”
There was an answer to that? “What?”
“Get married,” she said. Like Simple.
I frowned. “Get married?”
My mom nodded, like Obviously. “Put yourself in a position where you can’t lose interest.”
“I don’t think Pearce wants to get married.”
“Never underestimate the value of a good threat,” my mom said.
“But what if he says no?”
“Then you’re no worse off than you are right now.”
It was sneaky, and it was brilliant. And it worked.
One night, over dinner, I said, in the most pleasant, disinterested, robotic way possible, “Pearce, I’d like to get married. And if that’s not of interest to you, we should probably break up so I can find someone else.”
Pearce frowned a little, turned the idea over in his mind. And then he said, “Great idea. Let’s get married.”
And that was that. A week later, I had Grandmother Richmond’s two-carat engagement ring on my finger.
It felt like a triumph—until we stayed that way for four years.
Engaged—but not married—for four years.
We graduated college. He went into quantitative finance, and I decided, after much soul-searching, that I wanted to become a middle school math teacher and illustrate math concepts with fun activities like origami.
He decided to use his math major to make money, and I decided to use my math major to make art.
A choice that Pearce did not understand, personally or financially.
We still didn’t live together. He still answered only 50 percent of my texts.
He stalled and stalled, until one night his parents sat him down and told him they would like some grandchildren.
And now here I was, walking the plank.
I mean aisle.
Once we set a date, I was happy at first. But the truth was, as the wedding plans became more solid, I started to feel less happy.
Things that hadn’t bothered me before, like how he smacked when he ate pasta, and how his earlobes were too small, and how he checked his phone every three minutes, started to loom larger.
And larger.
He never used his parking brake. He couldn’t roll his rs. One side of his nose was a different shape from the other.
Not to mention: His favorite ice cream was Rocky Road. Maybe I was a little judgy from that high school job at Baskin-Robbins, but Rocky Road? That was old people ice cream! What was this—a retirement home?
It was as predictable as geometry. I could have written it like a proof.
Now that I had him, I didn’t want him anymore.
It was like a curse.
But curses were made to be broken.
Today, in the church, I reminded myself what my mother had said: The only way to stop running away is to stop running away.
So here I was: not running away.
Heroically.
Itching like hell—but doing it anyway.
Up by the altar, Pearce looked a little itchy himself. If I’m honest.
But Grandma Dodie kept walking, and so did I.
This was happening. This was nonnegotiable. This was the best solution I could think of—and I’d be marrying Pearce Richmond tonight if it was the dumbest thing I ever did.
AT THE ALTAR, I handed my bouquet to my big sister, Ashley. My little brother, Pete, soon to graduate from college, had agreed to be Pearce’s best man. When Pearce had asked him, Pete’s response had been “Don’t you have anybody better to ask?”
I’d elbowed Pete—hard—in the ribs and then answered for him. “That’s a yes. That’s a grateful and enthusiastic yes.”
But now I found myself wondering, too. Why didn’t Pearce have anybody better to ask? Cooper had never liked him the few times they’d met back in college. Was Pearce one of those guys other guys didn’t like?
Pete crossed his eyes at me when I glanced his way.
I ignored him. Stay focused.
Grandma Dodie pulled me down to kiss me on the cheek and then handed me over to Pearce.
The itching was getting worse. Was it inside my throat now? Had I inhaled some fibers or something? My airway definitely felt tight. Wouldn’t it be lucky if my throat closed up and I really fainted—for real?
Problem solved, huh?
Pearce stood next to me like a statue as the reverend, who’d encouraged us to be casual and call him “Rev,” came to stand before us.
But here’s the thing. I guess the rev felt like this was his moment to shine, because next, he launched into an extended-remix TED Talk about the internet, of all things, and how it was tearing us apart like nothing before in history—and how we needed to stop hating other people online and start loving them in the real world.
And I didn’t technically disagree. I mean: Yes.
Let’s hurry up and get on that. But my itching situation was ramping up by the second, so I really didn’t have time for some big, long pontification from some old dude with yellow teeth.
Let’s just say I lost focus.
My mind drifted.
Before I knew it, I was thinking about Cooper and trying to overlay the boy I remembered so well with the man who had shown up here today. That overgrown beard. That scraggly hair. What a waste of a good-looking man.
Hold on. Did I just classify Cooper as a “good-looking man”?
I’d actually given him a haircut once when we were kids, in our clubhouse, with some pinking shears.
What were we—ten? Eleven? I remember very confidently explaining to him that the zigzags on the blades would give his hair “body.” He’d been so trusting, sweet thing—and then he went home looking like he’d been electrocuted.
It was so bad, my mom made me walk across the street later with a bottle of chardonnay for his mother as a peace offering.
The next time I saw Cooper, he had a buzz cut.
Which made him look like a Norman Rockwell painting.
Would Cooper wind up coming to the reception tonight?
I wondered. Or was that teaser in the vestibule all the time I’d get?
Because I had a question I’d been waiting to ask him.
And if I’d had some warning he was coming, for god’s sake—if he hadn’t just crashed into this day out of nowhere—I might have had the presence of mind to ask it.
Or maybe not. I might need a bottle of chardonnay myself for that one.
Now the rev was wrapping up. He seemed pretty pleased with himself, like he’d really gotten how love works cleared up for everyone—and solved all of society’s problems as a bonus. Were we supposed to clap or something? I looked around.
And that’s when I saw Cooper, close by in a set of side pews, sitting alone with his elbow resting on his rucksack, watching me like he had X-ray vision into my thoughts.
Before I could look away, he lifted his hand and touched the side of his head—and as he did it, I swear, I heard his voice as clearly as if he’d spoken out loud: Stop, drop, and roll.
Dammit, Cooper, I thought. Why do you have to ruin everything?
And then, like there was no other choice …
I took a deep breath.
And I let my knees buckle.
And I dropped to the floor.