Page 13 of A Not-So Holiday Paradise

The rest of the world would probably disagree, and at first glance it’s easy to see why. In looks I resemble my mother; we share the same coloring and similar heights. My mother is a decidedly round woman, while I’m somewhere between curvy and plump, but even then we look alike. It doesn’t matter that she keeps her hair short and I keep mine long, or that she swears by Crimson Kiss red lipstick while I’ve never worn lip color in my life. She is a picture into my future, a snapshot of what I might become some thirty years down the road.

But there are two kinds of people in this world:bulldozersandbulldozees. And while my mother is firmly inbulldozercategory, my father and I are not.

It sounds bad, the termbulldozer.I guess a better way to put it would be someone who doesn’t back down versus someone who does. It’s not always a negative trait. Sometimes that’s just the way things are, that push and pull between people as they interact.

My mother pushes. And my father lets her.

She doesn’t mean anything by it, and my dad isn’t a weak man. It’s just their dynamic; he’s happy to concede if it’s not going to hurt anything, and she prefers things to go her own way.

Which is why, twenty minutes after my father has slipped and fallen on the rocks at the waterfall, my mother is convinced it’s time for him to go back to the ship. And she won’t hear a word against it, no matter how my father protests that he’s okay.

To be fair, he doesn’tlookokay. His knee is red and swollen where he came down on it, and his usually unruffled expression is instead twisted into a grimace. It’s my default setting to side with my dad when my mom is being pushy, but this time…I think she’s right.

“Mr. O’Malley,” Beckett says, rubbing the back of his neck. “I mean, it doesn’t look good.”

“It’s fine,” my dad says stubbornly. He managed to limp out of the water with the support of Beckett and Wes; now he’s seated on a medium-sized boulder while the rest of us huddle ‘round, holding court over his left knee.

“Look at it,” my mom says, gesturing to the knee. “It’s allred, Robert. And fat. It’s getting puffy.”

“Swollen,” I interject.

“He knows what I mean,” she says with a wave of her hand. “You need to go to the infirmary on the ship, Robert.”

I nod. “I’m no doctor, but they’ll probably need to wrap this.” I tap lightly on his leg.

“Well, I’m kind of a doctor,” Wes begins, “and—”

“You’re not a doctor. You’re a nurse,” I cut in, grinning at him. “You wear a little nurse’s cap and apron and let the doctors boss you around all day—”

“I donot,” Wes says hotly, “and you know it. Nurses arejustas smart as doctors—”

“Why aren’t you a doctor, then, if you’re just as smart?” I send up a mental apology to all the brilliant nurses out there who I’ve just insulted in order to aggravate my brother.

“Children.” The word comes from my mother, my father…and Beckett. All three of them are looking at Wes and I with exasperation, their facial expressions so similar they could’ve planned it beforehand.

I look at Wes. He looks at me. And then we burst into laughter at the same time. He clutches his sides as he doubles over, and I throw my head back, feeling the sun on my face.

As much as the two of us bicker like an old married couple (ew), laughing with him is one of my all-time favorite things to do.

“You’re the worst,” Wes says to me as he wipes tears of laughter from his eyes.

“And you’re the cutest little nurse in all the land,” I say, reaching over and pinching his cheeks. He swats my hand away, and I just laugh again.

He’s more serious when he addresses our dad again, though. “I’m sorry,” he says, “but I really do think we need to call it a day. You need to get this looked at, Dad. If you keep walking on it, you’re only going to make it worse.”

When my dad looks at me, pleading in his eyes, I shake my head sadly.

“I think they’re right,” I say, my voice soft.

“You were my last hope,” he says to me, his mouth tugging into a painful approximation of a smile.

I smile back, patting him on top of his bald head. “I know. And I’m sorry. But I don’t want you to get hurt. An explorer always remembers—”

“Safety first,” he finishes with a sigh.

It’s a mantra he was forced to come up with when I was just a kid, striking out recklessly on my own to discover and investigate and eat up the world in greedy, voracious bites. I wanted to experience everything, and it got me into trouble—falling out of trees, taking ipecac after nibbling unidentified mushrooms from the woods behind our house, getting stuck on the roof.

It was and is one of the main reasons I think I’m more like my dad than my mom. I get my admitted carelessness from her, that enthusiasm that leads me to act before I’ve thought everything through, but my insatiable desire to learn comes from my dad. And it’s one of my most defining qualities.

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