“Gray. What do you think, Chelsea? I want your honest opinion. Is that too retro?”
I stared at my middle-aged widowed father. We were standing in a bridal store in central Boston on the corner of Boylston and Berkeley Streets, and he was talking to me about wedding colors. His wedding colors.
“I’m sorry—I need a sec,” I said. I held up my hand and blinked hard while trying to figure out just what the hell was happening.
I had raced here from my apartment in Cambridge after receiving a text from my dad, asking me to meet him at this address because it was an emergency. I was prepared for heart surgery, not wedding colors!
Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. I wrestled the constricting wool scarf from around my neck, yanked the beanie off my head, and stuffed them in my pockets. I scrubbed my scalp with my fingers in an attempt to make the blood flow to my brain. It didn’t help. Come on, Martin, I coached myself. Pull it together. I unzipped my puffy winter jacket to let some air in, then I focused on my father.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“Pink and gray, too retro?” Glen Martin, a.k.a. Dad, asked. He pushed his wire-frame glasses up on his nose and looked at me as if he was asking a perfectly reasonable question.
“No, before that.” I waved my hand in a circular motion to indicate he needed to back it all the way up.
“I’m getting married!” His voice went up when he said it, and I decided my normally staid fifty-five-year-old dad was somehow currently possessed by a twenty-something bridezilla.
“You okay, Dad?” I asked. Not for nothing, because the last time I checked, he hadn’t even been dating anyone, never mind thinking about marriage. “Have you recently slipped on some ice and whacked your head? I ask because you don’t seem to be yourself.”
“Sorry,” he said. He reached out and wrapped me in an impulsive hug, another indicator that he was not his usual buttoned-down mathematician self. “I’m just . . . I’m just so happy. What do you think about being a flower girl?”
“Um . . . I’m almost thirty.” I tried not to look as bewildered as I felt. What was happening here?
“Yes, but we already have a full wedding party, and you and your sister would be really cute in matching dresses, maybe something sparkly.”
“Matching dresses? Sparkly?” I repeated. I struggled to make sense of his words. I couldn’t. It was clear. My father had lost his ever-lovin’ mind. I should probably call my sister.
I studied his face, trying to determine just how crazy he was. The same hazel eyes I saw in my own mirror every morning held mine, but where my eyes frequently looked flat with a matte finish, his positively glowed. He really looked happy.
“You’re serious,” I gasped. I glanced around the bridal store, which was stuffed to the rafters with big fluffy white dresses. None of this made any sense, and yet here I was. “You’re not pranking me?”
“Nope.” He grinned again. “Congratulate me, peanut. I’m getting married.”
I felt as if my chest were collapsing into itself. Never, not once, in the past seven years had I ever considered the possibility that my father would remarry.
“To who?” I asked. It couldn’t be . . . nah. That would be insane.
“Really, Chels?” Dad straightened up. The smile slid from his face, and he cocked his head to the side—his go-to disappointed-parent look.
I had not been on the receiving end of this look very often in life. Not like my younger sister, Annabelle, who seemed to thrive on “the look.” Usually, it made me fall right in line but not today.
“Sheri? You’re marrying Sheri?” I tried to keep my voice neutral. Major failure, as I stepped backward, tripped on the trailing end of my scarf, and gracelessly sprawled onto one of the cream-colored velvet chairs that were scattered around the ultrafeminine store. I thought it was a good thing I was sitting, because if he answered in the affirmative, I might faint.
“Yes, I asked her to marry me, and to my delight she accepted,” he said. Another happy, silly grin spread across his lips as if he just couldn’t help it.
“But . . . but . . . she won you in a bachelor auction two weeks ago!” I cried. I closed my mouth before I said more, like pointing out that