Page 1 of The Marriage Blunder

Chapter One

~ Jude ~

I’d just spent four hours on a plane next to a man who watched a cooking competition at full volume without headphones. He laughed out loud at the judging. Very loud.

He had what I can only describe as an entirely separate ecosystem happening in his lap, comprised of napkins, snack wrappers, and a paperback with a cover so worn I couldn’t read the title, though I spent a frankly embarrassing amount of time trying to decipher it through my peripheral vision.

The moment the wheels of the airplane touched the tarmac, my carry-on was already in my hands. I don’t check luggage. Checking luggage is for people who enjoy standing around conveyor belts watching other people’s duffels go by while experiencing the slow existential horror of a universe that has forgotten you exist.

I was not that person.

I color-code my grocery lists. I had contingency plans for my contingency plans. I had been gay since before I had a word for it, which was approximately two decades of my life where I was just walking around with this vague sense of wrongness and a persistent interest in cataloguing the forearms of male movie stars, and I’d be damned if I was going to leave my toothbrush in the custody of an airline.

As soon as I left the airplane, I called my mother. She picked up on the third ring.

“Jude Allen Thomas.”

I smiled at the admonishment I could hear in her voice. “That’s my name, yes.”

“You’re on vacation.”

“I’m at a bachelor party in Las Vegas, Ma. That’s not a vacation, that’s a field assignment.”

She laughed despite herself. I could hear it, the crack in her voice that she’d had since I was nine years old and brought her a dead beetle in a paper cup because I thought it was structurally interesting.

I had, in fact, spent most of the flight working. Spreadsheets don’t judge you. Spreadsheets don’t watch cooking shows without headphones. Spreadsheets don’t have forearms.

“How was the flight?” she asked.

Miserable.

“Fine,” I told her instead of the truth.

“You spent it working, didn’t you.” It wasn’t a question because she knew me too well.

“I spent it productively,” I insisted.

She made the sound. The sound she has been making since I was seventeen and brought a textbook to Thanksgiving dinner. It’s somewhere between a sigh and a laugh, the vocal equivalent of a woman who raised two children alone and still hadn’t figured out where she went wrong with one of them.

“How’s Carmen?” I asked.

Carmen was the home nurse I was quietly paying a substantial portion of my salary to keep on retainer while I was gone. My mother’s cancer had gone quiet for almost two years. Then it came back, and now we were all pretending this was a minor setback, and I was paying Carmen an hourly rate that could probably cover the mortgage on a small island nation.

“She’s a gem,” Clara said. “Made a very good soup today.”

She should be making excellent soup, given what I was paying per hour.

I did not say this.

“Good,” I said. “Eat the soup.”

“I ate the soup, Jude. I’m not incompetent.”

“I know you’re not incompetent. I’m making sure you’re not stubborn, which is different.”

“You got that from your father,” she said, which was her favorite deflection and also objectively untrue.

My father had been many things, none of them stubborn. He had been the kind of man who vanished from difficult conversations by developing a sudden interest in the weather report.