Page 33 of Sister of the Bride

“It’s good to honor your roots,” I say.

“Yeah, my mom was apoplectic the first time she called and realized her son had developed a Southie accent in Los Angeles,” he says, laughing, and I can only imagine Mrs. Sullivan’s reaction. Her ancestors came over on the Mayflower, and she still speaks with a slight Brahmin accent like a Kennedy.

“Why do I remember none of this?” I ask.

Toby opens his mouth and sucks in a deep breath, then shrugs and sighs. “You had other stuff going on,” he says, and then the timelines align in my brain, a little light of grief illuminating the answer. All that would have been right after my dad died, when I wasn’t paying attention to…well…anything. Unless that thing was Marino’s. And while I did eventually emerge from my grief haze and become a person again, I still spend most of my mental energy on the restaurant.

Or I did, anyway.

Before I can stumble too far downthatparticular rabbit hole of emotion, the door buzzes, and Toby hops up to grab the food and sets everything up on the oversize steamer trunk that serves as his coffee table. My mouth waters as he unpacks the burgers, fries, and Cokes, along with a pair of frappes that he stows in the freezer. I wait as patiently as I can, but as soon as he sits back down on the couch, I leap upon the food, shoveling handfuls of cheese fries into my mouth, leaving my fingers greasy and salty and cheesy. I reach across him toward the little pile of napkins on the couch.

“Gimme? Please?” I ask.

“Down, girl, nobody’s gonna take your dinner away,” he replies, laughing. He passes me a napkin, his fingers brushing over the back of my hand and lingering on a jagged pink scar on the back of my middle finger. He grips my hand and pulls it close to examine the raised flesh. Once again, that inconvenient zap of damn electricity shoots through me at the point of our connection.

“How’s my first-ever act of medical treatment holding up?” he asks.

“Honestly, I should sue. The scar still looks gnarly,” I say, jerking my hand away so I can sever the connection that feels a little too close for comfort.

“Well, you get what you pay for,” he says. He points at my forehead. “Lucky for you, I’ve learned an awful lot since then.”

The scar is almost exactly eight years old. It came from a tuna can. Dad always kept a stash of tuna packed in olive oil in his desk drawer. (“The good stuff, Pepperoni, not that water-packed cat food shit.”) It was his go-to quick meal when the smell of pasta turned his stomach after a long weekend shift (“Don’t tell Nonna I said that”) and he was too tired to walk upstairs or actually cook anything for himself. On the day of his funeral, overwhelmed with sadness and sick of the platitudes and prayers and sad looks from everyone around me, I went to hide out in there, sinking into his giant rolling desk chair that still smelled like him. I opened the drawer and found the little stack of cans and, realizing I’d barely eaten a thing since he’d died three days prior, I pulled one out and tried to wrestle it open with the little pop-top tab. The lid snapped back, and the sharp edge caught my knuckle with a jagged slice.

It was at that moment that Toby walked in, knowing just where to find me. He’d flown back on a red-eye as soon as he’d gotten the news, though I knew his parents had urged him not to come. He was barely a week into his first semester at USC and already had a punishing premed schedule, but he’d put the ticket on his emergency credit card and was at my side as soon as he possibly could be, rumpled and sleepless and ready to hold my hand through it all.

When he saw me staring wordlessly at my bloody finger, he pulled down the first aid kit my dad kept on the wall, knelt in front of the chair, and started tending to the wound without asking a single question.

That was the first time I cried after Dad died. I sat there as Toby silently cleaned the cut on my finger and let out three days’ worth of tears and a lifetime of tears to come. And after the wound was disinfected and covered with a Band-Aid, Toby pulled me to him and let me sob all over the suit jacket he’d worn to graduation just three months prior.

I still run my finger over the scar all the time. It reminds me of that horrible day, yes, but also that Toby has always been there for me. Even when he was supposed to be on the other side of the country.

But now the feeling of Toby’s finger lightly drifting back and forth across the scar makes my heart squeeze in extra beats. Slowly, silently, he lifts my hand and brushes his lips feather-light over my knuckle.

I suck in a breath, my heart stopping right along with my lungs.

Toby pauses, his eyes on that scar, and then he drops my hand and reaches for his burger.

And we eat.

We eat until all that’s left are greasy wrappers, spotted paper boats that held fries, wadded-up napkins, and a sprinkle of stray salt.

He doesn’t say anything about the fact that he kissed my hand, and I don’t either. Mostly because I’m not entirely sure that it actually happened. I have suffered a head injury, after all. And if it did happen, it was probably just him being a friend. Remembering that day, and how broken I was, and offering me some comfort. He placed a kiss on the Band-Aid back then too. It’s just another memory from our long friendship.

Toby clears away all the trash and returns to the couch with his iPad in hand, plopping back down next to me, and finally he speaks.

“I asked Turner to email me her wedding planning shit so you could look at it. You wanna check out some budget spreadsheets?” He turns and meets my eyes, no trace of any awkward moment there. Because it apparently wasn’t awkward for him. He’s not the one having sexy thoughts.

That’s all inmyhead.

Chapter15

Toby

How do you make a tissue dance?

You put a little boogie in it!

Pippin

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