“Gran!” she yelled. “I told you to destroy those candles.” Then she looked at me and the Svenssons. Between us, we were only in possession of one pair of pants, three socks, and a tie.
“Er…this isn’t what it looks like.”
Her grandmother took another shot. “I needed to burn them because they were the only thing powerful enough to cleanse the smell out.”
I started making subtle then not so subtle cut-it motions.
Grace’s head swiveled between us.
The Svensson brothers could barely keep a straight face and were not helping.
“They cooked Chris’s sperm!” Eric guffawed, collapsing on the ground.
Grace was appalled.
“Gran. I told you that was a bad idea.”
“Wait,” I said. “You two have previously discussed boiling my sperm?”
“You boiled it?” Grace grabbed the bottle of vodka and poured herself a shot then downed it quickly and coughed.
I patted her on the back.
“In the kitchen where people eat?”
“That was the first iteration of my new sperm disposal business,” her grandmother said. “Now I know. Next time, we’ll use an Instant Pot on the porch.”
“No,” Grace said, shaking her head. “Absolutely not. Honestly! I left you two alone for one afternoon.”
“To be fair,” I said, “it was like most of the morning, then lunchtime, and all afternoon. We were here alone a while.”
Grace glared at me. “You need a job. Both of you need a job.”
43
Grace
Imade Gran burn different, nicer-smelling candles after shooing Chris and the Svensson brothers out for a boys’ night. I had caught up on my editing work at the office earlier, especially since the last wedding had a curtailed number of photos in my queue. Now I needed to work on some sort of viral article that would magically convince the publishing house to produce my coffee-table book.
But all I could think about was Chris.
“You sent him away to not have the distraction,” I reminded myself as I sat at my desk, staring at the blinking cursor on the Word document.
I was not a writer; I was a more visual person. The most I had ever written were little captions in the scrapbooks I made for each bride. But now I had to write not only an article, but one that was funny, addictive, and interesting and would make people want to read it immediately then share it.
I rubbed the bridge of my nose under my glasses. I had zero ideas—not even bad ones.
I wished Chris were there.
You do not miss him, I scolded myself as I forced my brain to work on my article.
In the end, I only managed to write three sentences about how I wasn’t sure what to write then shut my laptop. It was hopeless. The cold fingers of despair grabbed my stomach. I went into the kitchen, which now smelled like rosewater and sugar cookies from the twenty Bath & Body Works candles I had set ablaze in the space, and heated up then stress-ate all the remaining leftovers from the wedding.
What if Chris comes back home with another woman?I fretted.
It was certainly within his right to. I had told him we were divorcing, that this marriage was meaningless. Still the thought of him with someone else made me feel irrationally angry.
He’s a grown man. If he wants to sleep around, that is on him. It’s not like we made some sort of lifelong promise of fidelity to each other, I reminded myself as I ate another big spoonful of pasta. After polishing off a wedge of wedding cake as big as my head, I staggered back to my bedroom.
