Chapter Six

· Six ·

Will

Any family dinner at my parents’ is rowdy. Add on a birthday celebration, and it’s mayhem.

I sit at the long pine table that dominates my childhood home’s dining room, crammed between my sisters, their partners, my niece and nephew, and my parents. Wildflowers and rainbow glitter, unicorn cutouts and dishes of my niece Eleanor’s favorite foods—birthday tradition, whoever’s birthday it is gets to pick the meal—now reduced to abandoned last bites, crisp edges, and crumbs littering the table. Napkins land beside plates. Chairs creak as we sit back. Whiskey and wine are passed and poured.

I’m lost in thought, my gaze drifting toward the window, where, right outside it, the warm summer breeze sways the damask roses Dad and Mom planted on their wedding day, which have grown and thrived for thirty-five years.

Thanks to my earplugs (without earplugs, it’s sensory hell), I can actually hear myself think, and I’m hung up on what I’ve been hung up on for nearly a week now—what I’m going to tell my parents about this plan of mine, without telling them too much. Or, more specifically, what I’m going to tell my mom. My dad’s a laid-back, quiet guy. He’s told me he trusts I’ll figure out my future. My mother, however, is and always has been very much up in my business—and she is very in my business on the eventual marriage front.

So far, I’ve told my parents I’m going to give Imogen, my third-youngest sister, a break from relationship upkeep at the bars and restaurants in the city that stock our whiskey. Immy’s a big-time extrovert who’s never complained about being the one to periodically pop into the city with her partner, Leo, schmoozing, dropping into our clients’ establishments for a bite, leaving them with a fancy thirty-year bottle, a sample case of a new batch we’ll be selling soon. She’s been doing that happily for years. But Immy just told us two weeks ago that she’s pregnant with her first, and with morning sickness having hit hard, the first trimester is taking it out of her. When I told her I’d handle the city runs, she threw her arms around me and burst into happy, relieved tears.

That’s what my parents know so far, and it’s a solid cover story, not to mention an actual reason it’ll work out for me to be in the city on the weekends for the next month. I could get away with that explanation and keep the rest to myself.

But I think I need to tell my mom I’m finally kicking off marriage plans, if only to get her off my back. Lately, she’s been nearly insufferable in her Help Will Find a Wife campaign, and the tiniest crumb I give is enough for her to picture an entire feast of possibility. For example, I mentioned once, offhandedly a few weeks ago, that it would be helpful if I married someone who didn’t hate phones and actually understood social media, and she’s been sending me female influencer profiles ever since.

I need her to know I’ve got it in hand so she lets up a little. I just have to be wise about how much I divulge. If I’m not careful, Juliet and I might find ourselves sharing our cup of coffee tomorrow with a very enthusiastic Isla Orsino wedged between us.

I’ve got everything in place for me to leave tomorrow. Fest knows how to handle things with the farm and the production side of the distillery. Our tours and tastings run over the weekends like clockwork, thanks to the second oldest of my younger sisters, Celia, who runs them. Logistically, I know everything will be fine.

I just don’t know how to tell my mother what I’m going to be up to without inspiring her to even more obsessed levels of interest in my efforts to settle down.

A bottle of open whiskey crosses in front of me, and I pass it along to Demi, wife to Helena, the oldest of my younger sisters, on my right. Demi smiles my way and mouths, Thanks!

Just as I turn back, Miranda, my baby sister, sitting to my left, elbows me.

I brace myself for the onslaught of sound and pull out the earplug in my left ear. “What, Mimi?”

She juts her chin toward the kitchen. “Ma wants to talk to you. Says she texted you.”

I check my phone and frown in confusion. I didn’t feel it vibrate with a text, but there it is: In the kitchen, please.

Sighing, I stand and traipse into the kitchen. Soon as I’m there, I take out the other earplug, then tuck it safely in the small case attached to my keys. I slip it all back in my pocket. “Hi, Ma.”

“Hi, Will.” Mom’s bent over Eleanor’s cake, which is covered in fondant, decorating it with tiny edible sugar unicorns and shooting stars. My mother’s rheumatoid arthritis isn’t going away, but her symptoms get quiet sometimes, and when they do, when her hands are nearly as nimble as they used to be, she goes all out.

After a final shooting star is placed just so, she brushes off her hands. “I have someone I want you to meet.”

My stomach sinks. “Ma, no.”

“Will, yes.” Mom straightens and faces me, nudging away with the back of her wrist a loose wisp of auburn hair threaded with white. “It isn’t a lady or gentleman, or, you know, person, I’m trying to fix you up with.” She spins the cake stand, inspecting her work. “It’s someone even better. It’s a matchmaker .”

“Jesus Christ.”

“William Orsino, you watch your language in my kitchen.”

I groan, scrubbing at my neck. “Sorry, Ma. But no matchmaker. I don’t need a matchmaker—”

“You told me yourself you don’t know how you’re going to find your someone. This is how! Your father and I met through a matchmaker—”

“A mutual friend at a party is not a matchmaker.”

Mom sets her hands on her hips. “Fee was only a business friend at the time, and it was a regional networking event. She introduced your father and I because of our mutually compatible interests.”

That “business friend” is one of her best gal pals. She and Fee talk on the phone every day.

“This ‘networking event,’?” I remind her, “involved a lot of whiskey and weed, as I remember the story going.”

Mom lets out a prim hmph and turns back to Eleanor’s cake, adjusting a unicorn. “That’s how it went in the seventies when you put a bunch of crunchy people together who were excited about sustainable land cultivation.” She spins around. “We’re getting off topic.”

I fold my arms across my chest, eyebrows arched. “Are we?”

“Oooh.” She stomps her foot. “Don’t be difficult.”

“I’m not trying to be. I’m just trying to tell you I don’t want a matchmaker.” I sigh, scrubbing my face. “Listen, I know you’re worried about me—”

She clasps my hand, a firm, steady squeeze. “I am worried about you. I’ve accepted what you say you want in a partnership from marriage, that you don’t expect it to involve love. I respect that. I’d be hypocritical not to—you know that’s how your dad and I started out, too. As friends who had a mutually beneficial business interest and mutual interest in the bedroom, too—”

“Ma, please!” I grimace.

She rolls her eyes. “My point is, I’m not trying to push you into something you don’t want, Will. I’m trying to push you toward what you keep telling me you want but you don’t seem willing to reach for.”

“That’s because I’m here all the time, working!”

“So take a break and get out of here!” she half yells.

“I am!” I half yell back.

We stare at each other, our faces both flushed, chests rising and falling.

She tips her head. “You are?”

Well, it seems it wasn’t so much a matter of finding the right moment to tell her as the right moment finding me. Here goes.

A sigh leaves me. I rake my hands through my hair. “You know how I’m going to start making weekend runs to the city tomorrow?”

Mom’s eyes go wide. Her face lights up with hope. “Mm-hmm?”

“I found someone—”

“Ack!” she yelps.

“Not the someone.”

Mom deflates like a balloon. “Oh.”

Eleanor, my niece, bounds in from the dining room, rainbow dress swaying around her, wild strawberry-blond hair topped with a glittery paper crown. “?’Scuse me, Nana. Is my cake ready?”

“Yes, sweetheart,” Mom says, smoothing my niece’s hair out of her face. “Uncle Will is going to bring it in right now. Then we’ll put the candles in it and sing!”

Ellie bounds out on a scream of excitement that makes me wince.

As soon as she leaves, Mom rounds on me. “So, who’s this person, then? What’s the plan? Tell me everything!”

“Ma.” I sigh. “It’s my business, okay? I just…wanted you to know what I was up to, so you can stop your worrying.”

“Just a little bit of details?” Mom clasps her hands together and gives me big, sad puppy eyes.

I groan. “Ma, don’t—”

“Pleeeease, Will? Don’t leave your poor old ma in the dark.”

“Christ,” I mutter.

She swats me on the arm. “Language!” Then she goes back to the big, sad puppy act, hands clasped tight.

I cave. I always cave with my mother. “Fine, but I’m only telling you this, and then no more questions. Promise?”

Mom crosses her heart. “Promise.”

“I’ve found someone who’s going to…help me…find my person.” It’s the truth, even if it’s incomplete. “That’s all I’m saying.”

Mom’s quiet for a few seconds, and then she smiles, wide and pleased as the barn cats after Miranda sneaks them bowls of cream. “Well,” she says, gathering up the candles and matches, smiling my way. “I like this plan of yours. It sounds very smart.”

I frown as I pick up the cake. “Yeah?”

“?’Course,” she says, patting my cheek. “Finding someone to help you find your someone? I had the very same idea.”

An exasperated sigh leaves me as I follow her out of the kitchen.

—

The following morning, I’m frowning at my reflection in my bathroom mirror, inspecting it as I brush my teeth. Celia might be right—I think the beard’s gone from semi-neglected to survivalist guy living in a bunker.

I peer down, where Hector, my rescue blue nose pit bull, lies at my feet, head resting on his paws. “Whaddayoufink?” I ask around the toothpaste foam.

Hector lifts his head, tipping it sideways. Then he harrumph s and drops his head back to his paws.

“Yeah.” I lean over the sink and spit—I’ve got a sensory thing about having too much toothpaste foam in my mouth—then go back to brushing. “You’re right. I’ll trim it a bit.”

The door to my house bangs open, and I startle so badly, I nearly take out a tonsil with my toothbrush. I glare down at Hector. “Some guard dog you are.”

He rolls onto his back and stretches.

“Lazy ass,” I mutter.

“Unca Will!” Eleanor shoves the door shut behind her, then skips her way through my home’s open concept living, dining, and kitchen area, heading toward the bathroom. “Where ya going?”

“Ellie, do Mum and Mommy know you came here?”

While I was having my coffee and walking through my garden this morning, casually inspecting my veggies, pulling stray weeds, I noticed Helena and Demi’s car in the clearing beside my parents’ house.

My childhood home is just a couple of hundred feet from my place, which is a former carriage house that I fixed up and made my own when I moved back after college. Helena and Demi stay over at Mom and Dad’s when they hang around late and have a couple of drinks and driving back to their place in town above their boutique skin-care and soap shop wouldn’t be safe. I’m not worried that Eleanor’s still here on the property, just that she left the house and has a tendency to wander off without telling people where she’s wandering off to.

My niece is walking my home’s floorboards, lost in concentration, her small feet carefully avoiding the cracks. After one more step, Eleanor hops into my bathroom and smiles up at me. Then she crouches, scratching Hector’s stomach. He groans happily and wiggles on his back.

“Ellie,” I say again. “Do Mum and Mommy know you’re here?”

Finally she peers up at me, face scrunched in thought. “Nooo, but they were sleeping. So I couldn’t tell them.”

I give her a look. “You’re not supposed to leave your house without telling someone where you’re going.”

“It’s not my house,” she counters.

I sigh. “The house you’re staying in, I meant.”

“I told Nana,” she says, starting to climb the narrow threshold of my bathroom, hands and bare feet pressed against both sides of the doorframe.

“So Nana’s awake,” I say.

“?’Course she is.” Ellie gives up on climbing, scrambles onto the toilet, and stands behind me. She reaches for my hair, quickly starting to braid a chunk in the back. “I woke her up. Then we got Hal because he was woke up, too.”

Hal, my nephew, is Ellie’s two-year-old little brother.

“Nana already make you pancakes?”

“Yep! With rainbow sprinkles. But don’t tell Mum or Mommy. Nana says it’s our sugar secret.”

I mime a zipper dragged across my mouth. “My lips are sealed.”

“So.” Eleanor tugs my hair, and I wince. “Where you goin’?”

I peer at her in the mirror, her tongue stuck out in concentration as she braids, or more accurately, tangles my hair together. “Ellie, did Nana send you here to ask me that?”

Eleanor makes a wide-eyed busted face she doesn’t realize I can see in the mirror, her gaze still stuck on my hair. “Ummmm. No!”

I gently reach for her hands, stopping them. “That’s a nice braid you did. But I need to get going, so no more braids today.”

She leaps onto my back, clinging like a koala. “Mm-kay. So. Where ya goin’?”

“Down to the city. And that’s all the details you and Nana are getting.”

She slides off my back and skips over to my open duffel, which sits on the dining table, ready for me to add my toiletry bag. Poking around its contents, she wrinkles her nose. “Where’s the shirt I gave you? You didn’t pack it?”

I hesitate, trying to figure out how to get myself out of this. Eleanor loves giving gifts. Especially on days when she gets gifts—at Christmas, on her birthday. Yesterday, after opening her birthday presents, she passed around her presents for everyone and very enthusiastically gifted me an eye-singeing burnt-orange button-up.

I’m not an orange-shirt guy. I’m not an orange-clothes anything . I’m a ginger. I’ve got enough orange going on as it is.

“Well, uh…” I scratch at my jaw. “Actually…” I clear my throat. “I didn’t pack it because…I was going to…wear it today?”

Her gray-green eyes, the same shade as mine, as Dad’s and Helena’s and my baby sister Miranda’s, go saucer-wide. “You are!?” She shrieks in excitement, hopping up and down.

And that’s how, thirty minutes later, I find myself, wearing a brand-new burnt-orange button-up, driving down the road.