Page 61 of This Love
Mommie Dearest.
Chapter 23
Tucker
One of the guys at the garage clued me into a movie I had never heard about. He said it was called 50 First Dates and starred Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore. The girl in the movie loses her memory every time she wakes up in the morning, and the guy has to convince her to fall in love with him all over again.
I watched the movie by myself at Gram’s before I introduced it to Ava. When I was sure that it was a good idea, I planned a whole evening around it. We made some Hawaiian dishes and blended fruity drinks, the virgin version, because alcohol didn’t play nice with Ava’s medication.
She giggled at the little umbrellas that I tucked in each glass. We sat down to watch the movie together.
I’m sure she didn’t laugh as much as the average person. She kept leaning forward and watching Drew Barrymore’s face. Every once in a while, she made a comment like, “That guy sure is determined to make her like him as much as she did the first time.”
And later, “That’s funny about how they have their first kiss over and over again.”
I caught some side-eye with that one, as if she was just now realizing how many first kisses she and I had already had.
As the credits rolled, we sat in the half-dark of the screen, curled up together.
Eventually, she said, “Do I kiss the same as I did the other times?”
That was quite a question. “I’m usually too stressed out about it to notice.”
She turned to me. “Really? Why?”
“Well, the first time, we were in front of your mother and hospital staff. You grabbed my face and snogged me.”
“Snogged?”
“It’s a British word for kissing.”
“I don’t like it. It sounds like a combination of snot and fog, and both are not good to think about when kissing.”
I laughed. “You’re right.”
“What about the second one?”
“That one was on a Ferris wheel at a carnival.”
“Oh, I saw the tickets in the scrapbook. Was it hard to get me to kiss you that time?”
“Terribly. You wanted nothing to do with me after you ran away from your mother’s house.”
“Yeah, that part of the scrapbook is hard to read.”
“That’s why I added sticky notes. It’s important to understand that her part of your life is over.”
“I didn’t have anybody, then.”
“You did, but you didn’t want us. Other than Harry.”
“What about the third time?”
“That was one of the easier ones. You were willing to watch the videos. It was only a few days after the reset.”
“Oh. That’s fast.” She looked down at her lap. “I guess we’ve done all the other stuff. The sleeping in the bed stuff.”
So, she was figuring things out. I figured Cosmopolitan would fill in anything she hadn’t picked up from TV shows. “We did. There’s a lot to it if you haven’t looked it up.”
