“What is it with you and telling people I know how to give massages? I couldn’t massage my way out of a wet paper bag. And I don’t know shit about cars.”

“Well, the good news is you don’t get out of paper bags by massaging them. And for the car thing we can just, I don’t know, look up a tutorial on Youtube and pretend you already knew how to fix the problem.”

For once, I felt like the one who needed someone to calm my anxiety. The gravity of what we were doing was settling in on me with the weight of a fucking mountain. Just hearing how excited her mom was to have us together made me think splitting up when this was all over wasn’t going to be so painless. I’d break that woman’s heart. It was obvious how badly she wanted things to work out between Pearl and me, and I couldn’t help but wonder if Eric wasn’t the only one to splendidly screw things up with Pearl.

Instinctively, I put my arm around Pearl and pulled her in for a hug.

“What are you doing?” she asked, sounding a little bemused. “They’re all waiting.”

“Yeah,” I said, letting her go and feeling a little silly. “Right.”

We headed up toward the main group and were introduced one by one to the overwhelming number of people from her family who had come for the wedding. There was her dad, Earl. He skipped straight past introductions and managed to get me into a several-minute conversation about the finer points of grilling the perfect hamburger. Eight minutes per side, no seasoning except salt, and, he explained, the true secret recipe was to not over-work the meat mixture. He also said it was essential to make your own blend of beef, skipping those store bought packs.

I didn’t really know much about grilling hamburgers, so I nodded along and took his word for it.

Then I met Merrick, Pearl’s older brother. He looked like he was a woodsman with a long brown beard and stern features with a thick build. He gave me a crushing handshake and grunted a few words of greeting, followed by a not-so-subtle suggestion to take good care of his sister. His wife was a small blonde woman who was very pregnant and very distracted by their two little boys running circles around her.

After Merrick came some aunts, uncles, and extended family. One branch of the family was very Southern.

The two standouts were Curtis and Lane, a pair of blonde-headed men in their early twenties. They both wore cowboy boots, concerningly tight jeans, and had plaid shirts tucked in just enough to reveal oversized belt buckles. Curtis was more wiry and bird-faced while Lane was thicker with the most freckles I’d ever seen on a human being’s face.

They both pulled me aside, leaving Pearl to give me an apologetic but encouraging smile, like she had known this was going to happen.