I mean, OK, there were worse things to have to do. I had managed to avoid looking at different types of table settings, after all, but it annoyed me that he was trying to make me be a part of this. Like he decided to “forget” the fact that I did not exactly give my blessing to this unholy union and if I ate enough vanilla butter icing then maybe I’d forget too. Still, because I’m basically a saint, I agreed to meet him in town. I was sick of looking at his “sad face” whenever I said I was too busy to do things like pick colors for organza chair covers.

The bakery was so painfully hipster I was embarrassed for Dad. He tried way too hard. The walls were subway tiled with botanical drawings as decor and everyone who worked there had a manky beard and a slouchy hat.

“What do you want to try?” Dad said, gazing up in wonder at the chalkboard menu.

“Is there an elderflower and cyanide sponge?” I asked.

“We have elderflower and gin,” a beardy man in his twenties said, wiping his hands on his immaculate apron. I did not believe he did any actual baking.

“How fucked up can you get on this gin cake?”

The man frowned.

“Saoirse,” Dad warned. “Ignore her. She’s seventeen. Hormones or whatever.” He smiled apologetically at the man. They shared a “kids these days” kind of laugh.

The shame hit me first. It prickled under my skin, roiled in my stomach. He’d put me in my place so he could buddy up to some guy he didn’t even know.

Then came the rage. Me making a harmless joke was embarrassing him, but he wasn’t mortified by his arse-kissing attempt to be bros with beardy douche?

Fuck that.

“My dad’s marrying someone new after locking my mum up in an old people’s home ’cause she got sick,” I said brightly. “New mommy wants to get hammered on the cake so she doesn’t have to wonder if he’d do the same thing to her.”

Dad pulled me by the sleeve to a table while the man picked his jaw up off the floor.

“What is wrong with you, Saoirse?” Dad hissed.

“I have no impulse control?” I replied, like I really wanted to figure out the answer to this question with him. “No, wait, it’s that I don’t have any fucks to give? I’m all out of fucks, that’s it.”

Dad shook his head and looked at the roof. That was his “silent prayer for patience” look. Don’t know who he was praying to; if he really wanted help, he should have been looking the other direction. Only Satan could help him now.