Page 24 of Marriage is a Shore Thing
“I lied,” he mouths to me.
“Lied about what?” I mouth back.
Van gives me an exhausted eye roll. “Everything.”
The otherwise sweet smell of wing sauce grows acrid in my nostrils. I want nothing more than to be outside—away from Van, away from this conversation, away from this careless mistake that’s upending my organized life.
Joanna continues, oblivious to our silent conversation, “Van said you two were picking up temporary silicone rings tomorrow because you didn’t like any of the ones in the jewelry store in Vegas. But—” It’s the way Joanna’s voice changes that tightens my grip on my phone. “It would really mean a lot to me if you could wear my grandmother’s ring.”
“You want me to what?” I nearly choke on the words.
“Don’t worry. It wasn’tmywedding ring,” she explains, mistaking the reason for my shocked response. “It’s not tainted like everything else was with…”
The sentence drops off. Joanna hasn’t been able to say my father’s name since she learned about his duplicitous lifestyle. To be fair, I haven’t called him Dad since then either. On the rare occasion I have to refer to that treacherous jerk, I call him Henry.
“Nona wouldn’t give it to him. I guess she had a sixth sense about him that I dumbly ignored. Since he couldn’t give me the simple antique gold band inlaid with tiny diamonds that’s been in my family for generations, he bought me an ostentatiously large diamond ring instead. Of course, I had no idea about any of this until much later.”
“You want me to have your family’s ring?” I try, but I can’t hide the wobble in my words.
Van’s thumb smooths back and forth on my upper arm. I hadn’t realized he was still touching me.
“Of course, honey.” Joanna’s voice softens. “You’re family.”
I have never lost it in public. I’ve shed a fake, tasteful tear when accepting a beauty pageant crown onstage, but I have never allowed my true emotions to show in front of others. But right now, I want nothing more than to cry like a lost, fragile thing at Joanna’s unwavering inclusion.
And I am not fragile.
Even before I took my life into my hands—or rather, my fists—I was taught not to break. Winners don’t bend to the relentless pressure and catty underhanded jabs of the other contestants. They tilt their flawlessly contoured cheekbones to the light, set a dazzling smile on their whitened teeth, and never let the clawing remarks of the competition faze them.
When I open my mouth to answer, nothing comes out—only my lower lip shakes.
I bite it for its insolence, frustration teeming through my bloodstream.
Van steps forward, moving close enough that if I needed to, I could lean on his sturdy chest. I should push him away. I should push all of this away. I should tell Joanna that we are dirty rotten liars, but I don’t want to break her heart when she just called me family.
Family.
That word had been problematic even before I learned about my father’s second household. My whole life, my mother would get angry when I wasn’t the perfect daughter. If I didn’t smile big enough, or say the polished polite answer, or apply eyeliner flawlessly. Over and over, she blamed me for the amount of time my father traveled for work. Had I been a better daughter, he’d want to stick around more.
Looking back on it, only seeing him one week a month should have been a tip-off, but I knew kids whose parents deployed for months at a time. My father supported us financially, paying forour house and my schooling. He was just distant—emotionally and physically.
My mother kept saying that if I won Miss USA, my father would come home to stay. Even through attending college and moving out, I aimed to win every crown I could. But after graduating, the tension between my mother and me grew. I’d breathe a sigh of relief when she didn’t call back or took two days to answer a text.
At that point, contact from my father had been sparse at best. I kept striving for Miss USA, but it became something I shared with my friends who were my roommates and fellow contestants. Not everyone had great parents, but at least I had a group of women I could trust.
Once I narrowly lost the Miss Pennsylvania title—therefore blowing my chances at Miss USA—my mother announced she was moving to Florida.
“I’m going to start over. You probably should too. We spent way too long waiting for that man to choose us.”
I don’t know what possessed me to have a private investigator look into my father, but I never expected that he’d have a whole separate family. And when I told my mother, looking for an ally for this massive betrayal, she told me she already knew—she’d known for years.
Just when I thought things couldn’t get worse, my so-called friends informed me they wouldn’t renew my lease. They didn’t want my ‘family drama’ or my losing streak to infect their perfect lives. In their eyes, I was washed up and no longer of use.
I moved out immediately and checked into a hotel, more untethered and alone than ever. It’d been a lifetime of bad days in the span of a week. Before I understood what I was doing, I found myself on Joanna’s doorstep in Wilks Beach, needing to notify her of my father’s deceit.
When I’d told Joanna who I was, she pulled me straight from her welcome mat into a hug, telling me she’d found out two months ago but didn’t know how to find my mother and me. It’d shocked me when she whispered wet apologies into my hair on my father’s behalf. The moment Joanna asked how my mother was holding up, I crumbled and told her everything.
It’d been the one and only time my sparkling veneer shattered.
