Chapter Fourteen
Fourteen
brEAKFAST THE NEXT morning wasn’t just breakfast, by the way. It was a matchmaking event with its own subsection on the spreadsheet.
That was my whole reason for going to breakfast: to get back on track and right my course with Finn.
But breakfast somehow wound up being about anybody—and everybody—but Finn.
Ashley had reserved a group of dining tables for the wedding guests, but she’d put place cards at only one: the hookup table for all the bridesmaids, the groomsmen, and the one sister who needed love connections.
Should I have been seated next to Finn at breakfast?
One hundred percent.
Ashley had drawn a seating chart: with me flanked by Finn on one side and my wingman, Cooper, on the other. This was the backbone of Operation Conquest: proximity and charm. Ashley’s job was to make sure that Finn was seated next to me at everything, and my job was to be relentlessly delightful.
Foolproof, Ashley insisted.
Except that Finn decided to be late, leaving an opportunity for Grandma Dodie to show up in a turquoise pashmina, fully ignore all the place cards, and plunk right down in his seat.
Cooper looked at me, like What now?
And I looked at him back, like This lady can sit anywhere she wants.
At that, Cooper moved to Grandma Dodie’s other side, leaving his seat open for Finn, and charmed her so aggressively that, at one point, I heard her say, “I just don’t remember you being this handsome.”
To which Cooper replied, “Well, I’ve been working on it.”
Meanwhile, I restored order by switching Finn’s and Cooper’s place cards and draping a napkin over Finn’s new chairback—trying to emphasize how very taken that seat was.
As Cooper asked Grandma Dodie all about her Spanish lessons, and the pastry-making class she was taking, and her upcoming trip to Barcelona, I kept the hostess podium in my sights, waiting for Finn to appear.
But no luck.
Instead, our table filled up, and every time someone tried to sit next to me, I’d hover my hand over Finn’s seat, like Sorry, taken.
I must have turned away ten people.
Ashley’s place cards idea was a bit of a fudge.
There weren’t really assigned seats in the dining room.
And once Grandma Dodie had joined us, that gave license to other grown-ups to join.
Before long, our neighbors the Vargases and the Dunns had also ignored the place cards and taken up spots once reserved for love connections.
Ashley saw what was happening and sent Brody over, trying to stem the tide. He added a bridesmaid to the table, a friend of Ashley’s from grad school whose name I could never remember—a person I just thought of as Bridesmaid Two.
Ugh. Bridesmaid Two. The worst of all the bridesmaids—and the one Ashley had just suggested setting up with Cooper.
“You can’t set up Cooper,” I’d protested. “He’s got his hands fully full with Operation Conquest.”
“After that’s over,” Ashley explained. “Once you’re happily together with Finn, and all that is mission accomplished. Then I’ll set them up.”
“Don’t you have somebody better?”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t like her,” I said with a shrug. “Women that pretty never had to develop a personality.”
“Her personality is fine,” Ashley insisted.
But I disagreed. “She’s an interrupter. And whatever she interrupts you with is never as good as what you were saying.”
“You won’t care, anyway,” Ashley said. “You’ll be off on the Smooching Deck with Finn.”
God willing.
But the situation wasn’t good.
Bridesmaid Two settled in at our table like she belonged there, acting like the cruise director–hostess of the breakfast table—warmly chatting with the neighbors and even prodding Grandma Dodie about the gentleman friend she’d been canoodling with.
“What’s his name, Grandma Dodie?” Bridesmaid Two teased.
Hey! That was my grandmother. I was supposed to be doing the teasing!
Grandma Dodie made an innocent face. “Edward?” she asked.
“Is he your boyfriend?”
“Not yet,” Grandma Dodie said, looking mischievous.
“You’ve got this, Grandma Dodie,” Bridesmaid Two said, making a hand heart. “I’m shipping you.”
Grandma Dodie frowned. “Shipping me?”
“Both of you,” Bridesmaid Two explained, like that should clear things up.
Grandma Dodie looked around the table like that didn’t compute.
“She’s rooting for your relationship,” Cooper explained. “Ship comes from relationship.”
Cooper glanced over at Bridesmaid Two. What were they now—a team?
“Are you sure that’s a real word?” Grandma Dodie asked, pulling a tiny pencil and pad of paper from her purse to write down this newfangled term.
“Don’t worry about it, Grandma Dodie,” I said.
But Grandma Dodie kept writing, forming the word ship in her careful, slanted cursive, and then writing verb in parentheses before writing the definition. As she wrote, she said, “If people are doing it to me, I want to know what it is.”
Can’t argue with that.
Bridesmaid Two. Already causing trouble. I glared at Brody, like he’d saddled us with her on purpose.
At this point, the table was almost full—and Finn’s empty seat was still in demand.
Even Harmony tried for it. She just walked right up and started pulling out his chair.
My hand flew out. “I’m sorry,” I said, looking up. “This seat’s—”
And there Harmony was, in a scoop-neck shirt, covered—positively wallpapered, shoulders to jaw—in purple hickeys.
I was so shocked that I hesitated for a microsecond, and then, by the time I finished with “… taken,” Harmony had already planted herself firmly in Finn’s seat—the last empty one at the table—and shaken out her napkin, and smoothed it over her lap.
With that, Finn’s reserved seat was gone.
Gone, but not forgotten. I stared at his place card mournfully.
“Sweetheart,” Mrs. Vargas asked as Harmony settled in. “What happened?” She touched her own neck to indicate she was asking about Harmony’s.
Was that a real question? Did Mrs. Vargas not know what those were? Was this appropriate breakfast talk?
“Oh, these?” Harmony said proudly. “These are love bites.”
Silence from the table—as everybody just stared.
“Good lord,” Mrs. Dunn said after a while. “I haven’t seen one of those in years.”
“I thought she’d been strangled,” Mr. Vargas said to the rest of the table, like this was a big relief, as Mr. Dunn chimed in with, “Or had a clotting disorder.”
“Good for you,” Grandma Dodie said, raising her orange juice. “Life is short.” Then she flipped another page in her notepad and wrote, Love bites—(noun)—hickeys.
Another long pause from the table as Harmony poured herself some coffee from the carafe.
Then, awkwardly, Mrs. Dunn tried to calibrate us back toward pleasantries. “And what do you do, Harmony?” she asked.
“I work in marketing,” Harmony said pleasantly. “But my academic background is in semiotics.”
Cooper and I looked at each other, like Well, that was unexpected.
“Is in what-iotics?” Mr. Vargas asked.
“Semiotics,” Harmony repeated. “It’s the study of signs and signaling in communications—and how to create meaning without words.”
Everybody just blinked.
“Like,” Harmony went on, sensing we needed help, “you know how you can look at a book cover and just know at a glance whether it’s a thriller or a romantic comedy?
Just by the font and the colors? Like a thriller’s going to have a black cover with caution-tape-yellow block text, and a rom-com’s going to be hot pink with script? ”
We all nodded.
“That’s semiotics.”
“People study that?”
“Oh, yeah,” Harmony said. “It’s a massive field.
The research is exploding. We’re all reading signs in the environment—and each other—all the time.
Picking up on nonverbal cues and information.
Words really seem so pitiful in comparison.
That’s how these happened, actually.” Harmony brushed her hand over her neck to indicate her love bites.
“Semiotics gave you love bites?” Grandma Dodie asked, trying out her new vocab.
Harmony leaned in, like she’d been waiting for just this question. “I’ve been doing a little reading on biosemiotics—which is how living systems signal to each other. Just dabbling. Just for fun.”
Cooper and I looked at each other again, amazed. Harmony—Harmony—spent her free time “dabbling in biosemiotics.”
She went on, “Like flocks of birds, for example—how they signal their formations to each other. And of course humans use biosemiotics all the time in social signaling. What we wear, how we carry ourselves, what facial expressions we use—it’s all signaling, all the time.
And I’ve had a problem in my life with seeming a bit …
aloof. Like I guess I have a resting shrew face. ”
Cooper and I tilted our heads at each other, like Does she know that’s not the phrase?
Grandma Dodie wrote that down, too.
Harmony went on, “I’d just started a new job in a new city, and I was having trouble making friends.
As usual. And so I started taking a deep dive into human social signaling, and comparing it to my own behavior, and trying to take some lessons from it—you know, like how smiling a lot will make people more likely to approach you. ”
Not sure we needed the science of semiotics to know that, but okay.
“And that’s when a crazy thing happened to me,” Harmony finished.
She had our attention now. We all leaned in.
“I randomly hooked up with this guy from Brazil,” Harmony began.
Oh, god. Where was this going? There were elderly people at the table!
“And he was a very enthusiastic person, if you know what I mean.”
I looked around the table. All the older women were nodding.
“Long story short: I woke up at his place late for work, had to do a sprint of shame back to the office, and I didn’t even notice until I got home after work that I’d had a massive bruise on my neck the whole time.”
“At work?” Mrs. Dunn asked, in a tone like Oh, dear.
Harmony nodded. “But guess what? I’m not always good at what they call ‘playing well with others.’ It’s never been easy for me to make friends…”