and planned to be an anthropologist, when she called and said she was marrying my father, my grandmother, grandfather, two uncles, and her aunt Cynthia got on a plane from West Virginia to fly out to California to be at the wedding. My grandmother even brought her wedding dress and took it in herself, making sure it fit my mother like a glove before she and my father saw the justice of the peace.
As for the Gallaghers, their son was clearly out of his mind. My father was on the swim team, he played golf, he was in a fraternity, and he was going to go into the family business, financial planning, just like his father and brothers. Everything was on track until, as the story went, he’d gone out drinking with some of his buddies, they got wasted, he ditched them since he’d missed lunch and was starving, and ended up at a tiny Thai restaurant at eleven at night. It was raining, the place was packed, and he had nowhere to sit. Out of the blue, he felt a tug on his hand. When he looked down, a woman he would have never noticed—pixie cut and big glasses—had slid over just enough on the bench at the indoor picnic table to give him a place to perch. He thanked her; she poured him a glass of ice water and turned and smiled at him.
“It was like the sun came out,” he told me years later when we were playing basketball in our driveway. He tucked the ball against his hip as he got a dreamy expression on his face. “Your mother’s eyes glow when she smiles, you know.”
I did know.
He was devoted to Brynn Pruitt from that moment on, and nothing in heaven or hell would change his course to make her his wife. When his family stopped paying for school, he got a job putting up drywall, took classes at night, and every summer they both worked to pay for his tuition come the fall. He changed his major to construction management, because he enjoyed the hell out of it, and his boss took him on, first as a partner, and then sold the company to him five years later.
My mother, who discovered a passion for exercise and helping others live healthy, opened fitness and physical therapy studios that offered everything from aerial silks yoga to rock wall climbing to water aerobics. Downstairs for the gym, upstairs for PT, because sometimes just hiking the stairs was enough to get the blood flowing. Her business was called Kinetic, and she put them up all over Northern California. Together she and my father did better than his family of hedge-fund managers.
My father had a soft spot for his family, though, so when they slithered—my mother’s word—back into his life, he had to explain that, while he wanted to be close again, he had no interest in having anything to do with them financially. Even a promise of being put back in his parents’ will did nothing to sway him. He didn’t need to be invited back to the house in Marin; he loved Palo Alto and his house on the street with big shade trees.
My mother, who had never been accepted—she was from a coal mining town in West Virginia, for heaven’s sake—was welcomed wholeheartedly into the fold when they noticed her chairing benefits, saw her face on the covers of all those different magazines, and especially when HGTV came calling and put her and my older brother in their line-up because they flipped houses together. It was like none of the unpleasantness had ever happened. The thing was, though, my mother was not, by nature, a trusting person, and her memory was long.
“You guys,” Courtney sniffled, blowing into the tissues I was holding to her nose and allowing me to clean up her face without ever losing eye contact with her phone screen. “It’s Cody,” she announced before pressing the speaker. “We’re all here.”
“Where the hell are you guys?” he growled at us. “It’s just me and Mak here, and shit, Mom’s gonna explode like Vesuvius any second now.”
“It’s fine, everything’s fine,” his wife, Makayla, assured us. “Though your cousin Justin did just ask me if I was a citizen before Cody and I got married, and I had to explain to him that I was actually born in Santa Monica.”
“He what?” Cody Gallagher asked his wife breathlessly, and I could hear the snarl and the rise in