as ever despite the million-dollar price tag the tech boom had hung on it. The sage-green painted exterior was nice enough, framed by solid bushes and a white bench tucked beneath a shady oak tree, but it gave way to an interior that had, in the decades-long war of attrition that was her parents’ marriage, become almost entirely her mother’s territory. Pillows with an indefensible number of tassels, framed flower prints jockeying for wall space, a menagerie of china and glass figurines—Diane had difficulty saying no to anything beautiful, or at least cute, or at least, well, whatever was appealing about the life-sized sculpture of a cat that glowered at them from the mantel. Family portraits from years gone by had the five Suttles smiling down, pressed and perfect, from every room. But the actual family tableaus formed in these rooms were never so idyllic. Kelly took a heavy breath as she entered the house. Something about the numerous clashing pots of potpourri, the unidentifiable cooking smells, the thick fug of repressed childhood emotions, made the air more difficult to breathe here. Kelly loved her family. But sometimes she thought it would be easier to love them if she didn’t have a career that kept her so close.
As she emerged into the kitchen, she looked to see what her mother was cooking, but her spirits fell when she saw her ladling an ominous, gelatinous something onto plates. The older she got, the more Diane embraced a sort of culinary Russian roulette, throwing ingredients together with abandon, and the results were as likely to be toxic as inspired. Kelly could already tell that tonight would be a miss. Meanwhile, Diane talked in a stream to Clara, Kelly’s twenty-five-year-old sister. Clara had a Disney princess thing going on: she wasn’t a supermodel, but with wide, round eyes and a sunny smile, she was the sort of pretty that made babies smile at her automatically in checkout lines and customers at the vintage boutique where she worked want to give her the sale. Her strawberry-blond head bobbed, listening raptly, while she pushed some parbaked rolls into the oven. Beside her, her fiancé Jonathan, an overgrown but good-natured jock getting soft in the middle since college, dutifully pretended to be doing something with the butter to look busy.
Across the kitchen, Kelly’s older brother, Gary, was half visible under his young daughters, who were summiting him like mountain goats. Kelly knew that there were three of them—triplets, in fact—but sometimes suspected he had picked up an extra one somewhere, like a leaf stuck to his hair. They made way too much sound for three humans and with the way they ran around, really, who could tell how many there were, or what was happening at all? It was like that game where you try to guess which cup the penny is under. The only possible solution is that there’s a secret fourth cup. They were just reaching the age when they were developing truly distinct personalities, and Kelly was half thrilled at watching their minds blossom, half terrified at the notion that all three girls could now run and turn doorknobs.
“I talked to the florist about the camellias,” Diane was saying as she fluttered around the kitchen, her sleeve of bracelets clinking, her dark hair motionless in its eternally perfect coif. Clara’s wedding, which was eight weeks away, was the topic du jour—it was the topic du every jour, taking the place of the gossipy stories that Diane usually recounted from Blush, the bridal shop she ran. “It’s vital that she understand. Gary, can you grab me the salad tongs?” Diane didn’t seem to notice that Gary currently had a shoe in one hand, an upside-down toddler in the other, and an Anna from Frozen doll in his mouth. Kelly dove into the room and scooped up the toddler while Gary seamlessly plucked the tongs from their container.
“Ah, Kelly, you’re here, finally. Hand me the lettuce spinner?”
Kelly struggled to perch her niece on her hip while extricating the lettuce spinner from a top shelf.
“So if we go with peach, that would mean—”
“White for the ribbons,” Diane finished Clara’s sentence. “And then—”
“Those other sashes for the bridesmaids, exactly,” said Clara.
“The ones you showed me a while ago?” Kelly asked.
“Which were those again?” Clara said, busily setting the butter on the table while Kelly offered the lettuce spinner rather aimlessly, trying to catch her mom’s attention. Diane seemed to have forgotten that she wanted it in the first place.
“Um, I don’t know, they were in a catalogue?”
“They’re all in catalogues, Kelly,” Diane asserted. “Don’t worry about it, we’ll tell you what to wear on the day.” Kelly set the lettuce spinner on the counter and pulled her niece closer to her instead, making her laugh with a funny face. She sensed that her energies were better expended there.
“Oh, hi, Dad,” she said, just noticing her father. His stillness in the whirl of motion around him had camouflaged him into the room.
“Hi, Kel,” he responded, not looking up from his white paper. Carl was always reading or scratching at something for his job as a civil engineer with the local water utility, but he never discussed his work with the family. For someone who worked so closely with technology, he spent an awful lot of time doing things the analogue way, and Kelly suspected this was because of Diane’s strict “no devices at dinnertime” policy. If he was working on a notepad, Kelly’s mom interpreted it as legitimate and let it slide.
Kelly’s father was one of those fifty-five-year-old men with a beard and glasses who looked like he was born a fifty-five-year-old man with a beard and glasses. Trying to imagine him as a young boy, a twenty-year-old, even, was ludicrous. His crescent of close-cut, early whitened hair never seemed to grow, get cut, or fall out. His favorite armchair was so molded to the angles of his body that he didn’t sit in it so much as wear it. And in the same way, he wore his marriage to Kelly’s mom. When they met, he was studying biochemistry, she theater. They were married before they graduated. A boiling, opposites-attract passion carried them through the first few years. By the time it cooled, Gary was there, and so was a mortgage, and a long future that seemed pretty much planned out. Diane’s silliness and flair for the dramatic didn’t age well, and Carl’s analytical intelligence became boring. They were married now more out of habit than love, though he never appeared to notice such things.
Diane thought often of such things, but was so willfully romantic that she saw only a long and happy marriage, a model for all the young brides-to-be at her shop. So she chattered on blissfully oblivious to her husband’s disregard, which was probably the secret to their “success.” She focused on the perfect image of her marriage in their family portraits and Carl focused on his work, neither looking at the flesh-and-blood spouse in front of their eyes.
Growing up in such a household, Kelly, an innately rational little girl, had had no choice but to review the evidence of her parents’ marriage and conclude that fairy tales were a load of fluff and bunk. With such a mismatched model of love, relationships had always seemed to her at best illogical, at worst a source of pain. And so she poured herself into her Legos, which turned into computers, which turned into intricate robotics systems. Machines made far more sense than people.
While the family ate dinner, or worked the chicken around on their plates to make it look eaten, the topic of conversation was, of course, still Clara’s wedding. Several important facts were established. Gary’s wife, Gina, an ER nurse with an insane schedule who couldn’t be here because she was working, because she was always working, hadn’t gotten a dress yet so, yes, Gary had picked out something for her that was color-scheme appropriate. Yes, Jonathan had passed Diane’s hair advice (instructions) on to his groomsmen, and it was duly received. And yes, Carl would take a dancing lesson for the father-daughter dance. This was news to Carl.
“A dancing lesson? It’s a wedding, not a cabaret.”
“Carl, this is your only daughter’s wedding—”
Kelly looked
