“I laugh thinking about it now. It was so ridiculous. So typical. We were young, barely twenty-one. Looking back, it made complete sense, and I don’t blame him at all. But at the time, I was so hurt.” She wags her finger at me. “In fact, if you had come to me at twenty-one and told me you were getting married, I would have told you not to, to take a break, anything to get you to wait longer. Getting married too young is the kiss of death for so many couples.” She folds her hands on the table and her gaze turns serious. “I wanted to get engaged, but your dad got cold feet. Said he wasn’t ready, that he wanted to see other people. So we broke up. And he did exactly that.”

I hold my breath, unsure if I want to picture my dad in his younger years sowing his wild oats.

I shake my head, refusing the visual. “Wow. What a jerk. That sounds so unlike him.”

“Exactly what I thought at the time.” She twists around in the direction of Dad’s urn. “You had a bit of a jerk streak when you were younger, Harold. Thank goodness you were handsome enough to make me forgive you.” She turns back to me. “I cried myself to sleep for weeks, I was so heartbroken. But then a month later he showed up at my doorstep unannounced. I was shocked. He looked terrible, like he hadn’t been eating or sleeping. He said he made the biggest mistake of his life by letting me go. He wanted me back right then and there.”

“Are you serious?” I grip the edge of the table with both hands, eager to hear more.

“Dead serious. But I wasn’t going to let him off the hook that easy.”

My fingers dig into the engineered wood. It’s like I’m listening to a page-turner on audiobook. “What did you do?”

Chuckling, she shrugs. “I told him no way I wanted him back. And then I went on a bunch of dates with a few other young men.”

“But . . . you said you were heartbroken over Dad. You said you wanted him back.”

“I did, but I wanted him to know I had options too.” She waves a hand in the air. “I wanted him to see that I wasn’t that easy to win back—that he would have to work for it. He got the message loud and clear after that. And a few weeks later, he asked me to dinner at this lovely little bistro in downtown Portland. And then he proposed.”

“Wow,” I say, breathless. My seemingly perfect parents had a borderline dysfunctional lead-up to their marriage.