I’m an introvert born into an extrovert world. When my social battery runs low, it short-circuits. Sure, I work with people at my day job, but that is mostly on my terms. I can go home to recharge. Fill up my senses. Make candles. Watch Ted Lasso and pine over Chase Collins.
I mean, forget that he ever existed.
But I can’t at the moment because he’s going to be at Freddie’s wedding. And because we’re both in the wedding party, that likely means we’ll have to interact. The last time that happened, I spilled milk all over his term paper.
And yes, I cried over it.
While I apply a face mask that promises glowing skin, Phoebe carries on the conversation. “Listen, if Oliver Boxworth is there, don’t mention my name.”
“Ooh. Sounds like a new story. Phoebe and Boxy, sitting in a tree?—”
“Phillipa,” my sister says in a stern voice, like I’m testing her patience.
“You know you’ve loved him since third grade.”
“No, I hate him and?—”
“And that’s why you refuse to call him Boxy like everyone else?”
“I refuse to call him anything, anytime, anywhere.”
“So Mum is still trying to see you two get married?” I take an educated guess because that is so like our mother.
“Enthusiastically so. But she’s tried a new tactic I should warn you about. It’s like reverse psychology but folded in half, doubled, and then turned inside out.”
While Phoebe outlines a complicated strategy our mother employs and how that brought her and “Bossy Boxy” together at a cricket match, nerves tumble in my belly.
The Crush List sitting on the bed is like a flashing neon sign for another, much bigger, gathering next fall that I have to brace myself for.
The Crushwill be there.
Forget the Smythe’s party. With Freddie getting married and Mum targeting Phoebe, she’s likely riding a maternal high ofseeing her adult children getting paired off. That leaves me as her quarry.
“You know that Dad goes along with everything Mum says when it comes to her goals for our love lives. Is there such a thing as ahatelife because I cannot stand to be in the same room as that—” Phoebe goes on a tangent about Oliver Boxworth. My bets are on them tying the knot.
But back to Mum and Dad.
How do I say this nicely? Libby and Thomas Thompson are characters. Erm, unique? Eccentric? All of the above?
My parents are only a few steps away from the ivory tower of the British aristocracy. They haven’t been given the keys yet. However, they do travel in the same circle as dukes, earls, and other titled gentry. And I mean that literally. They were recently yachting with the Marquess of Porthampton in the Mediterranean.
I adore my mother and father, but to say they’re out of touch is an understatement. Until six months ago, Mum hadn’t set foot in a grocery store in about nineteen years. She has “the help” do the hunting and gathering, as she likes to say.
From the pieces of the story that I’ve tried to put together, under duress, she needed something and went to the local market—she still won’t reveal what it was. Five hours later, Dad received an urgent call from the manager. She’d gotten lost in the dry goods aisle—perhaps fixated on the many options for paper towels, what with the ply count and whether to get a full sheet or partial. Don’t get me started on the printed, seasonal styles. I’m all too familiar with how decision-making can lead to overwhelm.
As for my father, he likes to believe that he’s a man of the people. However, if he turned on the radio, he wouldn’t be able to sing along to a single song. And yes, I specifically mean radio. He doesn’t know what music streaming service apps are.
This isn’t to criticize. No, Mum and Dad are wonderfully unique, kind, and generous. They’re just a bit quirky. #Relatable.
Gemma, my roommate before she got married, was watching the first episode of a television show that was called Something-Creek. I can’t quite remember. I sat there spellbound because the main couple was a facsimile of my parents, but before they lost all their wealth—the characters, not my parents. Nope, Mum and Dad Thompson are swimming in the stuff, if such a thing were possible, but that seems like it would result in paper cuts. Mum drips in jewels and Dad seems to replace his golf clubs with each outing. But it’s new money, which doesn’t carry quite the same currency as old money—at least in their circle.
However, what they’re missing, and my mother reminds me of this with frequency, is a son-in-law. And by that, she means she wants grandbabies to spoil.
I’m not opposed to that at all, however, I have yet to meet anyone who isn’t a billboard for my parents’ arrival among the elite—someone who fits their mold or who will clinch a connection to elevate them fully into that world.
Or, and more importantly, someone who understands me because I’ve also been called quirky.
Standing in the bathroom of my youth, which is still well-stocked with luxury bath and beauty products—because my mother wouldn’t have it any other way—my limbs somehow go limp and freeze at the same time as a second realization sends the wiggly little line right off the Richter Scale.
