The Shippers(41)

“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.