Page 37 of Best Woman

It rains the morning of Aiden’s wedding, but it’s that particular kind of Florida rain where the sun shines through the clouds while it drizzles for fifteen minutes, leaving it just as hot and twice as muggy when the downpour ends.

I feel remarkably well rested after a night of amazing sex and late-night room service with Kim, watching sitcom reruns on her hotel TV between rounds.

Mom was still awake when I got home around one, eyeing me knowingly as she vacuumed the spotless floors in a burst of night-before jitters I remember well from every big family trip we took growing up.

I’m not due at the temple with the rest of the groomsmen until an hour before the ceremony starts—I gracefully bowed out of “groom golfing,” citing my scheduled primp-and-polish session with my mother this afternoon.

I spend the morning catching up on all the work I’d been putting off, shooting Everett a series of apology texts with no reply.

Anxious and at a loss for what to do, I randomly decide to swing by my dad’s.

He is as shocked to see me when I open the door as I am to be standing there, but he covers it quickly, ushers me inside, and offers me a Diet Mountain Dew.

We sit in silence on his couch, watching CNN and sipping our sodas. I look around at his little house, full of random objects he’s held on to since before I was a child of divorce. Dad always insists he’ll need them someday. It isn’t as bad out here as the garage was, but it isn’t great.

“You know, I could help you organize things in here, maybe decorate a bit more…intentionally. It’s kind of what I do.

” If we moved the bookshelves into the corner, turned the couch so that it faced the sliding glass doors, and replaced the tattered old desk chair with one of the extra dining chairs I’d seen in the garage…

this place could be nice. I could think about my dad here all alone and know that at least his home was warm and comfortable and that I’d been able to help make that happen.

“Sure,” he says. “But you’d have to spend more than an hour here to do that.”

I duck my head, chastised, with burning cheeks. It wasn’t that I didn’t love him, but every time we were together there was a ticking clock counting down to one of us saying something that would piss off the other one.

“I don’t leave until Monday, I could come back after the brunch thing tomorrow.”

“Sure,” he says again. “We’ll see.”