People We Meet on Vacation Emily Henry (unputdownable books txt) 📖

If you think that will work, she replies. I’m getting tired of waiting for grandbabies.

I roll my eyes and exit out of the message. Mom has always adored Alex, at least partly because he moved back to Linfield and she’s hoping we’ll wake up one day and realize we’re in love with each other and I’ll move back too and get pregnant immediately. My father, on the other hand, is a doting but intimidating man who has always terrified Alex so much that he’s never let one ounce of personality out while in the same room as Dad.

He’s brawny with a booming voice, mildly handy in the way so many men of his generation are, and he has a tendency to ask a lot of blunt, bordering-on-inappropriate questions. Not because he’s hoping for a certain response but because he’s curious and not very self-aware.

He is also, like all members of the Wright family, not amazing at modulating his voice. To a stranger, my mother shouting “Have you tried these grapes that taste like cotton candy? Oh, you’ll love them! Here, let me wash some off for you! Oh, let me wash a bowl first. Oh, no, all our bowls are in the fridge with Saran Wrap covering our leftovers—here, just grab a fistful instead!” might be mildly overwhelming, but when my father’s brow crinkles and he blasts out a question like “Did you vote in the last mayoral election?” it’s easy to feel like you’ve just been shoved into an interrogation room with an enforcer the FBI pays under the table.

The first time Alex picked me up at my parents’ house for a karaoke night that first summer of our friendship, I tried to shield him from my family and my house, as much for his sake as for my own.

By the end of our first road trip home I knew enough about him to understand that his walking into our tiny house filled to the brim with knickknacks and dusty picture frames and dog dander would be like a vegetarian taking a tour of a slaughterhouse.

I didn’t want him to be uncomfortable, sure, but just as badly, I didn’t want him to judge my family. Messy and strange and loud and blunt as they were, my parents were amazing, and I’d learned the hard way that that wasn’t what people saw when they came through our front door.

So I’d told Alex I’d meet him in the driveway, but I hadn’t stressed the point, and Alex—being Alex Nilsen—had come to the door anyway, like a good 1950s quarterback, determined to introduce himself to my parents, so they “wouldn’t worry” about me riding off into the sunset with a stranger.

I heard the doorbell and went running to head off the chaos, but in my vintage pink-feathered house shoes, I wasn’t fast enough. By the time I got downstairs, Alex was standing in the front hall between two towers of stacked storage containers, getting batted back and forth by our two very old and badly behaved husky mixes, as a slew of unseemly family photos stared down at him from every side.

At the moment I came skittering around the corner from the stairs, Dad was booming out, “Why would we worry about her going out with you?” and then, “And when you say ‘going out,’ do you mean that you two are—”

“Nope!” I interrupted, dragging the hornier of our dogs, Rupert, back by the collar before he could mount Alex’s leg. “We are not going out. Not like that. And you definitely don’t need to worry. Alex is a really slow driver.”

“That’s what I was trying to say,” he stammered. “I mean, not the driving speed. I drive . . . the speed limit. I just meant, you don’t need to worry.”

Dad’s brow furrowed. Alex’s face drained of blood, and I wasn’t sure whether he was more unnerved by my father or by the layer of dust visible along the baseboards in the hallway, which, frankly, I’d never noticed until that moment.

“Did you see Alex’s car, Dad?” I said quickly, a diversion. “It’s very old. His phone too. Alex hasn’t gotten a new phone in, like, seven years.”

Alex’s face went red even as my father’s relaxed into interest and approval. “Is that so?”

Still, all these years later, I can remember with vivid clarity the way Alex’s gaze flickered to mine, searching my face for the correct answer. I gave him a little nod.

“Yes?” he answered, and Dad clapped a hand on his shoulder so hard Alex flinched.

Dad gave a big, no-holds-barred grin. “It’s always better to repair than to replace!”

“Replace what?” Mom shouted from the kitchen. “Did something break? Who are you talking to? Poppy? Does anyone want some chocolate-dipped pretzels? Shoot, let me just find a clean plate . . .”

When we finally finished the twenty-minute goodbye required to leave my house and made it back to Alex’s car, he said only of the whole affair, “Your parents seem nice.”

I responded, with accidental aggression, “They are,” like I was daring him to bring up the dust or the humping husky or the two billion childhood drawings still magnetized to our fridge or anything else, but of course he didn’t. He was Alex, even if I didn’t understand everything that meant back then.

In all the years I’ve known him since, he’s still never said an unkind word about any of it. He even sent flowers to my dorm when Rupert, the husky, died. I always felt we had a special connection after that night we shared, he joked in the card. He will be missed. If you need anything at all, P, I’m here. Always.

Not that I have the note memorized or anything.

Not that, in the lone shoebox’s worth of saved cards and letters and scraps of paper I allow myself to keep in my apartment, this one made the cut.

Not that there were full days during our friendship’s hiatus when I tortured myself with the thought that maybe I should throw that card away