The Shippers(16)

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.