The Shippers(7)

It was my Grandma Dodie instead. Standing proud for duty at five-two.

Had I been foolishly thinking that my dad would show up for the most important day of my life? That was on me.

What was I, a beginner? My money should’ve been on Dodie from the start.

She held out her elbow gallantly when she saw me—cute as a dumpling with her little white halo of hair.

I took her arm, but I had to stoop a little.

I smiled big at the whole sanctuary of guests who had turned to gaze at me as I whispered, “Where’s Dad?”

“He missed his flight,” Grandma Dodie whispered back, the same way.

“Of course he did,” I said, brightening my smile.

“He’s hoping to make the reception,” she offered.

“Don’t bet on it.”

Now I was itchy and angry.

Typical. My absentee dad. He had one job—and now my grandma was doing it.

Per usual.

He’d already missed the rehearsal dinner. He’d missed 90 percent of the first-ever brunch with the Richmonds, too—taking a work call ten minutes in and then pacing around a side garden on his cell for the rest of the meal.

Not to mention he kept calling them the Richlands.

None of this was shocking. He was a vestigial parent, after all.

He had three children, and he could barely keep them all straight. He didn’t know our birthdays. He always mixed up what schools we went to. He consistently got our ages wrong. It was a parlor game at this point: quizzing our dad on basics he should already know and then triumphing as he got every one wrong.

If you can really call moments like that “triumphs.”

Anyway, it was fun, in a way. He deserved it.

Ashley once dared him to say our middle names—and he missed all three, while our mom looked on, her head tilted in wonder. For Ashley, he tried Elizabeth, Isabel, and Henrietta before my mom finally cut in with, “It’s Rose, sweetheart. After your mother.” I got Martha, Bonnie, and Julia before we explained that mine was Dorothy, after Grandma Dodie—my mom’s mom. For our brother, Pete, he insisted on the very random name Timothy for a while before trying a whole host of others like it was a literal guessing game—“Miles? Franklin? Steven? Paul?”—until Pete finally put him out of his misery and said, “It’s Raleigh, Dad. After you.”

My father wouldn’t retain this education, of course. None of it would stick.

In six months we could do it all again, no problem.

We were like the idea of a family to him—more than we were real people.

It was fine. It was funny at this point.

“Don’t worry about it,” my mom always said. “He’s a good provider.” Then she’d wink at us and say, “And you hit the jackpot with your mom.”

We’d hit the jackpot with Grandma Dodie, too, who was seventy-eight years old and feistier than the whole lot of us put together. She lived with us now, and she was cultivating antique roses in the side yard, and taking an art history class on the Impressionists, and baking her own sourdough every week. She’d founded an old lady workout group called the Screaming Mimis that walked three miles every day. She had a whole crew of travel friends who had nursed their husbands through long, final illnesses and were “ready to have some fun”—and they went to see Broadway shows, and took riverboat cruises, and spent random weekends in Marfa, Texas, drinking Tito’s and tonic at the hotel where they’d filmed Giant.

Even right now, walking the aisle, Grandma Dodie was moving faster than I was.

“We’re supposed to go slow, Dodie,” I whispered. “Mrs. Richmond wants the processional music to finish.”

“Nonsense,” Dodie said. “I’ll be in a coma in the nursing home before we’re halfway there.”

I didn’t argue. The sooner I got out of this gown, the better.

Which prompted me to notice, a little late, that the whole time I’d been talking to Cooper … I hadn’t been itching.

Like, at all.

I’d totally forgotten to itch.

But now, as I walked the aisle like a plank, the itching was back—times ten.

By the halfway point, I had to lock my elbow and make a fist to keep from scratching my neck. You know when something itches so bad you would happily claw off all your own skin just to make it stop?

It was like that.

Down at the end, a million miles away, was Pearce. Waiting. In a tux. A tux he owned. Because he was the kind of guy who owned a tux—and the studs and cuff links to go with it.

Pearce had been a math major like me. We got together in college after a blind date where we ate sushi, talked about math all night, and then walked back to my dorm. Never underestimate the power of talking about something you love with a fellow lover of that same thing. I honestly think he seduced me by talking about differential equations.

Even though, looking back, we came at math from different angles. I liked the challenge of how to make the complexity of it more accessible. Pearce, I think, was the opposite. He liked how the complexity of it made him look smart. So much smarter than everybody else.

Our shared language was math—but we spoke different dialects.

Either way, though, it felt a lot like love.

Pearce did not kiss me when he dropped me off that first night, but he did say, and this is verbatim: “I really enjoyed our time together. Let’s do this again sometime.”