Chapter Eight
Eight
ONE MORE LESS-THAN-GREAT thing happened before Ashley’s wedding.
The night before the cruise began, I overheard my mother having a fight.
There was a spot by the AC vent in the hallway where you could hear everything going on in the kitchen.
And here’s what I heard: Apparently my dad had taken a job promotion without telling my mother.
One that would require him—and by extension her—to move to Germany.
And it had apparently seemed like such a no-brainer to my dad that he had said yes to it all without telling my mom.
I’d never heard her so angry.
“You didn’t even check in with me, Raleigh,” she kept saying. “You just accepted.”
“Because you had enough on your plate already! I was trying not to add stress to your life.”
“You accepted a job in another country without telling me”—my mom’s voice was actually trembling—“and then you put the home that we’ve lived in for thirty years up for sale—also without telling me—”
I put my hand over my mouth. Holy shit!
“—and you thought somehow that was not adding stress to my life?”
My dad didn’t even try to answer that question.
“I’m not going,” my mother said then. “I’m staying right here. You can go if you want to, but I’m not going.”
“You want to live apart?”
“We’re already living apart, Raleigh. You work all the time. You missed your own daughter’s wedding.”
“That was the airline—”
“No—you cut it too close and you missed your flight. It wasn’t the airline. It was you.”
“She didn’t even go through with it,” my dad pointed out, like that might help his case.
“And why do you think that is?” my mom snapped.
But my dad didn’t answer.
“Raleigh, please listen to me. You missed. Your own. Daughter’s. Wedding.”
Silence.
Next, she said, “Whatever you’re chasing, you’re chasing it too hard.”
“I’m sorry about the house,” he said. “I’ll make it right.”
“I think it’s too late to make it right.”
“What does that mean?” my dad asked.
But my mom didn’t answer.
“What are you saying?” my dad pressed.
“I guess I’m saying,” my mother said, her voice so calm it was almost spooky, “that I want a divorce.”
Wow …
Wow.
A divorce?
I mean, there were many—many—things about my parents’ marriage that could be improved. But a divorce?
After all this time?
They just had their thirtieth wedding anniversary!
After she said the word divorce, my dad panicked and begged her to reconsider, but I could already call it.
My mom had made her decision.
“Don’t tell me I don’t love you,” my dad said.
My mom sighed. “I’m just really not sure,” she said, “if you even know what love is.”
After a while, my parents got quiet. So quiet, for so long, I couldn’t stop myself from tiptoeing down—skipping the squeaky step—and peeking into the kitchen.
My dad was in a kitchen chair, his arms clutching my mom’s waist.
She was tolerating it, and absently patting his head, and staring off into the middle distance like she was still trying to absorb the conversation they’d just had.
“It’s for the best, Raleigh. I really think it is.”
In a thousand years, I never, ever would’ve imagined my parents getting a divorce. This was the life they’d built for themselves. This was what they’d agreed to. It wasn’t gonna win any prizes, but they were okay. They were fine. They’d been fine for years.
Except, I guess, maybe they weren’t.
Maybe, deep down, my mom had been seething. Or, short of that, maybe just lonely.
That was enough of a reason, wasn’t it?
He really was always working. It was the only thing he liked to do. He didn’t have hobbies. Or friends. Or areas of interest.
Those things were my mom’s.
She maintained their social circle, and sent the Christmas cards, and made dinner, and confirmed doctor’s appointments, and brought fresh flowers home from the grocery store. All the mortar that held everything together? That was her.
But I’d always thought that she liked doing that stuff.
Maybe it was more complicated than that.
My first thought was for my mom: What would the dating pool be like for a fifty-seven-year-old lady? The pickings had to be slim. She might not ever find anyone else.
But my second thought was even worse. How, exactly, would my dad even survive without my mom? He was sixty—and his own dad had lived to ninety. What on earth would he do with himself without my mother for the next thirty years? It was inconceivable.
A post-divorce montage for him flipped through my head: my dad in a sad, pre-furnished apartment, eating microwave dinners and drinking stale coffee, forgetting to open the curtains. All the invisible, unappreciated things my mother did that lifted up his life, gone.
That was bleak.
Without a man, my mom would still have Grandma Dodie, and good friends, and great food, and laughter, and her kids, and cozy mysteries to read, and her flower garden, and places to visit.
Without my mom, my dad would have … stale coffee.
God.
He’d wither away.
He’d forget to recycle his newspapers and become a hoarder, and stack them to the ceiling in every room—and eventually die by suffocation in his recliner when they finally avalanched down on top of him.
It was a lot to take in.
My mom concluded the talk by telling my dad not to tell anyone about this until after Ashley’s wedding.
“Let’s get through the wedding,” my mom said, “and then we’ll tell the kids.”
But my dad’s brain was still churning. “If I can change your mind on this cruise,” he asked then, “will you change your mind?”
My mother sighed. “I wouldn’t bet on it.”
“One week.” My dad nodded, like he was forming a plan.
“You’ve had thirty years so far,” my mother said, “so I wouldn’t get your hopes up.”
I COULDN’T, OF course, tell Ashley about any of this. And I couldn’t tell Pete, either, because he had no filter.
In the end, I just had to keep it to myself and wonder over and over if my mom had just made things better or worse.
Meanwhile, life was still happening, whether we liked it or not.
I still had a cruise to get through, and a childhood crush to conquer, and more than enough problems to solve.
I did go to Ashley’s hairdresser, and I did get a blowout.
I did pack more of Ashley’s sexy clothes into my suitcase than comfortable ones of my own.
I did practice walking in heels, and I did research seduction tips for ordinary people in the wee hours of the internet, and I did get my toenails painted hot pink.
For luck.
I worked out the exact number of hours we’d be on the ship together to try to nail down my time frame.
I color-coded the activities schedule with highlighters.
I even read a book called How to Make a Man Fall in Love with You and then made a spreadsheet from key points—with a tentative conquest schedule that included to-do items like “ask him about his job,” “prioritize moonlight,” and “eye contact, eye contact, eye contact.”
Would it succeed? Who knew?
But by the time our whole family showed up at the wharf on embarkation day and got in line to board, all that late-night googling settled it for me.
Conquering Finn—and all my intimacy issues along with him—would be my main objective on this cruise.
It would give me purpose. And focus. And—why not? —a little bit of hope.
Not to mention, it just might work.
After all, I did get catcalled on the dock that morning by three dudes from another ship, who were all wearing T-shirts that read LET’S GET SHIP-FACED.
Which they already were, by the way. At ten in the morning. So ship-faced, in fact, that they tried to board our ship—the MS Enchantment—when their ship, the MS Decadence, was down the wharf.
Perhaps not the highest quality admirers.
But it was fine. I’d had a rough six weeks.
I’d take any encouragement I could get.
FYI: You can’t just walk onto a cruise ship like you’re checking into a hotel. There’s a whole process. You have to wait in a long, snaking check-in line on the dock and get all your papers examined before they’ll let you anywhere near the gangway.
So that’s what I did that morning. I stood in line next to my family, trying to look pretty with my fancy hair, wearing a pair of shorts disguised as a miniskirt and the most painful heels known to man.
Not to mention: a snug T-shirt of Ashley’s with one of those gravity-defying padded bras underneath.
I didn’t need padding, for the record, and the bra felt a little cartoonish, but the whole getup was Ashley’s strong recommendation for the best first impression on Finn, and the stakes were too high to argue.
She was a scientist, after all.
Mostly, I just tried to stand like a pinup girl while I craned around, hoping for a glimpse of my destiny.
But my destiny turned out to be hard to spot.
Not everybody on the ship would be part of our wedding party, of course. Of the 1,600 passengers, fewer than a hundred of them were here for Ashley’s wedding—and it would’ve been even fewer if my childhood neighborhood hadn’t decided to make it into a block party reunion.
As the check-in line inched forward, I kept thinking that finding Finn shouldn’t be so hard.
I’d memorized his photo already. I knew what he looked like these days.
But I had a confounding variable: the dominant image of Finn in my head was Finn as a teenager.
Tall, tanned, and blessed with the metabolism of a jackrabbit.
I knew that version of him very well. Too well.
I’d carried it in my memory all these years like a photograph.
If I was twenty-six now, that made Finn—a senior when I was a freshman—twenty-nine.
Which also made him, of all things, almost thirty.
Which seemed so wrong. It was like he should have been suspended in time in the golden hues of his high school reign as class president, quiz bowl champion, and varsity captain of everything.
Could Finn be almost thirty? Would that even work?