Chapter Six
Six
THERE WERE SO—SO—MANY things to dread about my sister’s wedding. The next wedding on the family agenda.
Not that I was making a list.
Did I mention that it was happening on a cruise ship?
No joke. An eight-day cruise to the Bahamas and Cozumel.
My big sister, Ashley, worked as a marketing manager for a cruise line called Escapes, and one of her many perks was discounted group fares.
It was part of the reason she took the job.
So when her boyfriend, Brody, popped the question, a cruise wedding was, as they both loved to say, “a no-brainer.”
I wasn’t much of a cruise ship person myself.
I wasn’t much of a weddings person lately, either.
But here we were.
Six weeks to the day after I left my perfect fiancé at the altar, my whole family would set sail from Galveston, Texas, for eight endless days at sea—accompanied by eighty of our dearest friends, lifelong neighbors, and weirdest relatives.
Twice the number of takers we’d had for my wedding, by the way.
Can’t beat a discount cruise.
And some—maybe not all, but plenty—of those people were going to be asking about, puzzling over, or teasing me about my wedding debacle for far too many of those eight days.
I should also mention that Brody, my sister’s groom, was actually a guy I had dated briefly in high school—for like a week—before I’d dumped him, like all the others.
That’s how he and Ashley met, in fact.
After the breakup, Brody had showed up on our front walk with flowers and stood there, Say Anything style, refusing to leave.
So Ashley dragged him to a coffee shop—out of pity—to explain how hopeless I was.
“He just seemed so lovelorn,” she explained, “clutching those sad carnations.” She also thought he was “kind of cute.” And it wasn’t his fault, she liked to say, that he was “collateral damage” from my “issues with intimacy.”
She was just picking up the pieces.
In the end, he gave her the carnations. They became friends, and then more than friends, and now, after dating pleasantly for almost ten years, they were getting married. And it was great.
He was a perfectly nice guy.
Not to me, exactly—but in general.
He was good for Ashley. I was happy they were happy.
But was old Brody still a smidge bitter about me dumping him a decade ago?
Weirdly, yes.
I wasn’t going to be his favorite new in-law, that was for sure.
So add that to the list I wasn’t making of things to dread on the cruise.
How many was that now?
Trapped on a ship for eight solid days as a self-inflicted spinster while celebrating my sister’s marriage to a groom who didn’t like me?
Not good.
Not to mention, I had promised Ashley when we were children that I would serenade her at her wedding. Apparently she was going to hold me to that.
But that’s a whole digression.
The point is: It was a lot.
I wish I could tell you that something wonderful happened in the six weeks between my aborted wedding and the start of Ashley’s cruise. I wish one of the jobs I’d applied to had panned out, or I’d had a romantic dalliance, or I’d even just found a fantastic new pair of shoes. Anything, right?
Good things happen all the time.
People make new friends, and discover great little Italian restaurants, and buy fuzzy socks they wish they could never take off.
It was just, in those six weeks … none of those good things happened to happen to me.
Kind of the opposite, in fact—even though I was trying so hard to manifest the positive. I lost my favorite necklace. The coolest coffee shop in town closed down. My best grad school friend called to say she had to take next semester off.
Maybe I should have worked harder to find a good thing or two. I’m sure there was a sunny day in there somewhere.
But I just … couldn’t.
Did I use those weeks to, say, come up with some insights about myself and take some wise lessons from the Pearce debacle so I could move forward with grace?
I did not.
I wallowed.
Specifically, I beat myself up with the echoing question: What—seriously, what—is wrong with me?
But it wasn’t a real question. It was rhetorical.
I formatted a mental spreadsheet of all my flaws—A record of failed relationships! A compulsive need to be the dumper! Leaving an A-list groom at the actual altar! WTF!—like I was collecting proof that I was hopeless.
Not a growth mindset, to say the least.
Plus, I’d be paying my parents back for that margarita drink wall forever.
In my defense, though—how do you even begin to solve … your entire personality?
Get into therapy? Confront your absentee father? Join a fight club?
Nothing added up. For weeks and weeks, I couldn’t solve the taunting, blinking question mark at the center of my life.
Until.
One night at our kitchen table, the week before we set sail, as Ashley was opening last-minute RSVP cards, and Grandma Dodie was filling welcome bags to put in guests’ cabins, and my mom was working on the endless Sudoku puzzle of all the guests’ cabin arrangements … we had an insight.
It happened right after my mom informed me that I was going to have to room with our freakiest cousin, Harmony.
Harmony, whose unofficial nickname was Grumpy Cat. Harmony, who was endlessly difficult and unlikable. Harmony, who had alienated every single member of our family so thoroughly over the years that my mom could not pick a single other person for her to room with.
My mom had gone over it, and over it, and over it, she said. Finally, she looked up over her readers and sized me up. Then she took my hand and squeezed it. Then she said somebody was going to have to take one for the team.
And that somebody was me.
“You don’t mind rooming with her, do you?” she asked.
Ashley snapped her head up at that. “You cannot put JoJo with Harmony. She has the personality of a dung beetle.”
My mom looked back down at the spreadsheet. “Our only other option is Cousin Ann. But remember when Harmony stole her wig?”
“She’s still mad about that,” Grandma Dodie said.
“Anybody but Harmony!” Ashley said, still aghast. “Put JoJo with Pete.”
A headshake from my mom. “Pete’s with Dad—to keep Pete out of bridesmaid trouble.”
Ashley shrugged, like Reasonable.
Then Ashley said something very sweet. Something that captured just how appalling the prospect of anyone having to room with Cousin Harmony really was: “Put JoJo in with us.”
My mom frowned. “With ‘us’ who?”
“With Brody and me. We’ll get a rollaway bed.”
At that, my mother put her hands on her hips and turned to face Ashley head-on. “On your wedding cruise?”
“Brody would frigging love that,” I said.
Ashley sighed, like Fine. Then she insisted again, hollowly, “We can’t put her with Harmony.”
“I agree,” my mom said, “we can’t.” Then she gave me a little shrug of apology. “But we have to.”
Harmony it was. Roomies.
Here’s a great life lesson: Things get worse, yes. But they also get better.
Because that’s when the situation got so bad, it forced us to make a plan.
As I worked to accept my new fate, and the four of us tied bows on programs at the kitchen table in a pleasant, half-occupied rhythm, the conversation drifted pleasantly, as it often did, to the old family-favorite topic of What’s the deal with JoJo?
I didn’t mind—honestly. I’d take all the help I could get.
Ashley, after all, was studying for her master’s in marriage and family therapy on top of her day job in marketing so she could go into private practice and have flexible hours in the “mom phase” of her life.
Which meant she had slowly become our family’s resident psychologist.
I really didn’t know what my deal was. My attempts to understand my behavior were all math-based—looking for underlying patterns—but Euclidean geometry and algebraic topology and combinatorics never seemed to get me very far when I applied them to the human heart.
Mine, in particular.
Luckily for me, the humanities had plenty of theories about what might cause intimacy issues, and Ashley had studied them all.
Her reigning theory for years—and we tweaked it and reworked it a lot in these conversations—was that I’d imprinted on our parents’ unsatisfying relationship, and now I was endlessly seeking a neglectful mate to take the place of my neglectful father.
I mean: Yeah, okay.
My dad was the problem. That wasn’t news.
Ashley had been a college freshman taking Psych 101 when she’d busted out this theory for the first time. “It’s called sexual imprinting,” she’d explained one night at this very same kitchen table.
“Please don’t say that word,” I’d said, and then I lowered my voice to a whisper for the benefit of my mother, sitting right next to me, “in front of Grandma Dodie.”
“What word?” Ashley asked. Then, louder, just to mess with me: “Sexual?”
“Ashley!” I said, like Hush!
“It’s a medical term,” Ashley went on, totally unimpressed with my squeamishness. “Don’t be weird about it.”
Before I could declare my natural-born right to be weird about anything I chose, my mother took an interest in this new theory. “Is it like how ducklings imprint on their mothers?”
“Yes,” Ashley said, “except that’s for a maternal figure, and this is for a mate.”
“You think JoJo imprinted on your disinterested father and now only wants a disinterested mate of her own?”
They both turned to regard me.
“I mean,” Ashley said, “it tracks.”
It didn’t not track. I’d give her that.
Or maybe I was just cursed.
“But what about you?” I protested to Ashley. “You grew up with the same absentee dad, and you’ve had one nice boyfriend after another since the seventh grade.”
“People are complicated,” Ashley said with an apologetic shrug. “I probably imprinted on the good stuff.”
All to say: This theory had gone unchallenged for so long that we all just accepted it now as a simple fact about who I was.
Even me.
But then tonight, very casually, almost as an aside, Ashley took that unchangeable fact and just … changed it.
“I just read a new study on imprinting, by the way,” she said.
This topic needed no introduction. My mom and I looked up and waited.
“Apparently,” Ashley went on, “you can imprint on a first kiss.”
Well, that was news.
Ashley kept going. “It’s because first kisses are so emotionally charged. In certain cases, they can become more.”
“What does ‘more’ mean?”
“More than just memories,” Ashley said. “They can become pivot points in our lives.”
“Like—you never get over the person you kissed?”
Ashley nodded. “Pretty much.”
My mother and Ashley both turned to study me, like this felt promising.
“Who was your first kiss?” Ashley asked then.
I shrugged, like Duh. “Finn Turner.”
“What!” Ashley shrieked.
“Our Finn?” my mom asked, pointing in the direction of the Turner house down the street.
“Yeah,” I said. “It was a neighborhood kids’ game of truth or dare. He had to kiss me—blindfolded—out behind the sports shed at school.”
“He was blindfolded?” Grandma Dodie asked.
“I was blindfolded,” I said.
“How old were you?”
“Ten.”
“And he was—”
“Thirteen, I guess.”
“Bit of an age difference,” Ashley said.
But I wasn’t having it. “Harrison Ford has twenty-two years on his wife, and they’re doing fine.”
Ashley was already pulling out a yellow legal pad to take notes. “Was it a good kiss?”
“It was.”
“Good enough to imprint on?”
I shrugged. “Good enough to spark a massive crush that lasted six years.”
“That’s how that crush of yours started?” Grandma Dodie asked.
“Yep. It started with that kiss, and it didn’t fade until after he went off to college. Even that took a year.”
Totally unrequited, by the way.
“Oh, my god,” Ashley said. “Why didn’t you tell us this sooner?”
I lifted my shoulders. “Because I didn’t know it was relevant?”
“It’s not relevant,” Ashley said. “It’s everything!”
The rest of us took that in. Then I said, “It is?”
And Ashley said, “Yes. Because we just solved all your problems.”
“All of them?” I challenged—just as my mom, delighted, said, “We did?”
“Yes,” Ashley answered us both. Then she tapped on the stack of RSVP cards she’d been sorting and said, “Because that very same Finn—that very same newly divorced Finn—just RSVPed yes to the wedding.”