John was still giving me that look. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Polly putting on her coat as she walked by in the wide center hallway without glancing in our direction.

“Get it?” I said to John as the front door creaked open. “It’s a pun on supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, one of my favorite words in the whole wide world. I’m still not over the fact that I wasn’t old enough to get in to see the original Mary Poppins at the Marshbury Playhouse for free by saying the word correctly when the movie was first released.” I gulped down some air. “Basically, because I wasn’t quite born yet. But still—"

“Besides,” I said, interrupting myself, because somebody had to, “eloping on Valentine’s Day is the ultimate cliché.”

John slid his glasses up the bridge of his nose and closer to his eyes, perhaps the better to see me. “Or the ultimate romantic adventure.”

I chugged some coffee, made a mental note to cut back on my morning caffeine and leave the stale puns to John, who was better at them. I looked at the kitchen clock again. Wondered if I had time to point out a few of our many and myriad elopement obstacles before I was late for work.

For starters, John and his dog Horatio had been a package deal. Right after we’d decided to buy my family house, a feral cat we named Pebbles had given birth to four kittens under the front porch, and we’d kept them all. Scruffy Dog was our most recent canine addition—she’d been a stray, and she and Horatio had fallen madly in love at the beach. It took John a while to come around, but eventually he did the right thing and Scruffy Dog became part of our pack.

It wasn’t easy to find someone to keep an eye on seven pets, plus my father, who’d come with the Hurlihy family house and was even more work than all the animals put together. My pregnant and single assistant teacher Polly had moved in with us, too, after being traumatized when a nor’easter rolled through her waterfront winter rental on the other side of Marshbury. And last time I checked, my brother Johnny was still separated from his wife and living out back in my father’s friend Ernie’s canned ham trailer.

Both my father and brother appeared to be madly in love with Polly, so even if she was willing to take care of the animals, who would protect Polly?