The Shippers(55)

“Did you take my sunscreen?” he asked Ashley right then, and she turned back to answer.

Sunscreen. I’d be needing that today.

When Ashley turned back to me, she took one more look at my neck and then gave me a sly smile. “You should tell Finn it is Tabasco sauce,” she said. “And then dare him to lick it off.”

“Ashley!” I scolded, looking both ways down the hall.

But nobody would overhear. The bridal suite was above the waterline. Definitely not with the wedding block.

“How is it rooming with Harmony?” Ashley asked then, wrinkling her nose.

“That’s—another whole saga,” I said, implying I’d have to tell her later.

Would I tell her later? I had never withheld anything from Ashley. But things were already different now. Seeing Ashley and Brody framed through the doorway in their matching robes? They really looked like a married couple.

Did husbands and wives tell each other everything? Could I trust Ashley now to keep anything between just us two? By the end of this week, she and Brody would be married. She was going to take his last name—and leave “Ashley Burton” behind for the very unfortunate “Ashley Cockburn.”

And even though Brody’s last name was technically pronounced Coh-burn, that didn’t make it any better. Once you saw it written out—on a name tag, or a wedding invitation, or, maybe worst of all, the back of a sports jersey—you couldn’t unsee it.

As Pete liked to say: Ouch.

But there was no reasoning with Ashley. This was happening.

They’d already put a down payment on a house and merged all their bank accounts and everything.

Before we knew it, they’d be making little Cockburn babies.

Soon, she’d belong to him.

Which meant, I realized with a sting of loss, that she wouldn’t belong to me anymore.

That’s when Brody called, “Ash? I need you.”

Ashley glanced back, very pleased to be needed, and then blew me a goodbye kiss.

As I walked down the hallway, she popped her head out to call after me, “I want all the details the minute you’re back!”

I turned around to say, “You got it!”—not even sure if that was true.

But she’d already closed the door.

In the elevator, I ran into my dad. His arms were full of bags of paper flowers.

I took a couple from him to be helpful.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he said.

“Dad,” I said then. “Are you busy?”

He obviously was.

“Not at all,” he said.

“Could I talk to you for a minute?”

“Sure. Of course.”

He was headed to give those bags to my mom, but we paused at a little outdoor seating spot along the way and set the bags on a table.

“I need to tell you something,” I said.

“Okay,” my dad said. “Shoot.”

“I know about you and Mom.”

My dad’s eyes widened. He looked—caught. “You know—?”

“About all of it,” I said. And then, in a move that felt like revealing a state secret, I said, “I heard you. Through the vent on the stairs.”

“You heard…?” He waited for me to clarify, like he was hoping we had different definitions of all of it.

“I heard everything.” Then I leaned in to whisper, “About Mom wanting a divorce.”

My dad frowned, like he wasn’t sure how to feel about me knowing. Then he glanced around and said, “Please don’t tell your sister.”

“Of course I won’t,” I said. “I wasn’t even going to tell you.”

“Why are you telling me?”

“I heard you say you were going to try to change Mom’s mind.”

My dad nodded.

“How’s that going?”

My dad shook his head.

“Because I decided something last night, and you need to know about it.”

My dad nodded, like Tell me.

“I decided to help you.”

“Help me?”

“Help you change Mom’s mind.”

At that, he lifted his hand to rub his eyes. “Sweetie, I’m not sure you can help me. I’m not even sure I can help myself.”

“It’s not too late,” I said.

My dad looked away, like he was studying something in the ocean. Then he said, “I think it might be.”

“I love that you’re trying,” I said. “I can tell that you are.”

“I am,” he said.

“You’re doing all the right things,” I said.

My dad nodded, like that was good feedback.

And I cannot describe to you the shock I felt at what my dad did next, because such a thing had never, to my recollection, happened before.

He spoke in a whole paragraph.

A long one.

I’m telling you, the man must have been holding in an emotional Mount Vesuvius, because once he started talking, he couldn’t seem to stop.

There might have been more words in this one moment than all the words he’d ever spoken to me before that.

“You know,” he said, watching the ocean, “my parents never got along. They fought all the time. They barely tolerated each other their entire marriage. I never remember them laughing, or having fun, or even touching. And the thing they fought about was money. Every day, they fought about money. I grew up poor. Paycheck-to-paycheck poor. We were always struggling. So it seemed pretty clear to me that being poor was the problem. And when I met your mom … I just fell so hard for her. I wanted us to be happy. I always thought my number-one job was to work hard so that you kids and your mom could have a nice life. What if we lost the house? What if one of you got really sick? What if I became expendable at work? So I said yes to every opportunity, and I took overtime, and I gave it all I had. But everything’s a trade-off, JoJo. You can’t be everywhere at once. Being at work meant that I wasn’t at home. I told myself it was better that way. That the best gift I could give you kids was time with your mother. I thought if I could just do that, we’d have nothing to be unhappy about.”