Epilogue
PETE AND BRIDESMAIDTwo didn’t last, by the way. Let’s get that out of the way right now. A force of nature like Pete can’t be contained.
But guess who did last?
Grandma Dodie and her new friend, Edward. They’ve already signed up for another cruise. Together.
My parents lasted, too. Thank god. For my dad’s sake, if no one else’s.
My dad didn’t take the promotion—in fact, he scaled back his hours—and he never talked about selling our house ever again. My mother took to showing him all her household bookkeeping, just to help him stop worrying, and it became a little joint hobby for them. They were never going to be Rockefellers, my mom loved to say, but they were just fine. I think my dad found it soothing. And my mom liked the way he gained a whole new appreciation for the household systems she’d been running all these years.
It was the most affectionate I’d ever seen them.
They weren’t, like, chasing each other around the living room sofa like twenty-year-olds or anything.
They were just… content. Just peaceful. They signed up for abeginner Spanish class so they could plan a trip to Mexico City and see the pyramids. They built a raised vegetable garden and started researching heirloom varieties. They got matching pedometers and started taking walks in the evenings after supper.
I took on the job of trying to help my dad grow as a person—forcing him loudly at family dinners to take credit for sweet things he’d secretly done, and outing him over and over. “Dad filled up Mom’s gas tank today,” I’d announce to everybody. “Isn’t that romantic?”
“What’s romantic about gas?” Pete would ask.
“If I have to explain it to you,” I’d say, “you don’t deserve to know.”
It embarrassed my dad beyond words to be praised like that, but I didn’t stop.
“This is good for you,” I’d say, slapping him on the shoulder. “It’s only making you stronger.”
The one thing I couldn’t square with my new sense of my dad was his problem with names. It was really bothering me. It didn’t fit. How couldanyone—honestly—be so bad with names?
Guess what?
I googled it, and there’s a real condition called nominal aphasia… where you can’t remember names. My dad’s not the kind of guy who’ll ever go in for official testing on that. But just knowing that condition exists, and knowing that he fits all the diagnostic criteria—that’s plenty for me. And I made sure this was front-page family news. It wasn’t that our dad didn’t care enough to remember our names. It was that he had a genuine, diagnosed-off-the-internet neurodivergence.
My dad thought it was all hooey, by the way.
But I thought it explained everything.
I regret how we saw him before. The working too much, the never taking credit, the forgetting names… we used it against him. We never questioned it. We never looked deeper for underlying patterns—or tried to understand why.
I’m sorry for all the time we wasted. I’m sorry we misjudged him. But I know that sometimes you can’t solve the problem until you solve the problem.
MY PARENTS WEREN’Tthe only happily married couple in the family. The newlywed Cockburns were also doing well—and I’m happy to report that becoming literal relatives with me did help Brody work through his bitterness about me dumping him in high school.
Eventually.
Ashley and Brody bought a fixer-upper and decided to renovate it all by themselves—despite the fact that neither of them was particularly handy. The family got a betting pool going on how long it would take. My mother, ever the optimist, predicted three years, and my dad predicted five—but my money was on ten. Still, despite a brief mold problem from a plumbing leak, a possum infestation under the pier-and-beam living room, and a moment when they worried a door in the attic that kept slamming by itself might be a ghost, my sister and newest brother were moving forward on All Things Married with verve.
“You and Cooper should get engaged,” Ashley kept pulling me aside to say. “Lock Cooper down before he comes to his senses.”
“Noted,” I’d say.
“How can you be so chill about this?” Ashley would demand.
“There’s no rush to get engaged,” I’d say.
And there really wasn’t.
Because we were already engaged.
