I was about fifteen when I started to get the idea that my family was kind of weird.

Take my parents, for example. When I was little, I always had this idea that my dad was effortlessly super smooth and suave, never ruffled by anything. When I got older, I started to realize that it was kind of the opposite. My dad was smooth, in the sense that he never did anything that embarrassing when I introduced him to my friends and was even, on occasions, kind of cool, but it dawned on me one day that this was anything but effortless, and in fact he worked really hard just to seem as though he wasn't trying hard at all.

It was a little later when I started to understand that this was all about my mom.

My mom was weird in her own right. My dad made it sound like the dating situation in their high school had basically been a battle royale of guys fighting for my mom's hand, and I kind of actually believed it because, even now, no matter where my mom went, people just seemed to want to take care of her. She had these big eyes and this innocent, kind of spacey look, and I think all that, combined with the fact that she was fairly petite, triggered an instinct in people that made them want to just want to pat her on the head and protect her and make her smile. Like, at the grocery store, guys appeared out of nowhere and offered to carry our bags out to the car. At the movie theater, my mom got free popcorn for no reason. It was ridiculous, and it drove my dad nuts when he saw it happen because my mom refused to believe that anything unusual was going on at all. I guess that, for her, that was just how life had always been. What was extra funny was that she was really not at all a helpless ditzy type; although she was the easier parent to sneak things past, in comparison to my eagle-eyed dad, she was also smart, sometimes prickly, and actually more levelheaded than him.

Case in point about the levelheadedness: I realized one day that, secretly, my dad was absolutely terrified that if he didn't wake up every morning at 6 and work out for half an hour, and if he didn't do some big romantic gesture at least once a month, and if he wasn't charming as hell at their work parties, and if he didn't help us with our homework no matter how tired he was, and if he let the washing machine stay broken for more than 24 hours, that their marriage would crumble and my mom would leave him for a better option.

And that was actually really sad, because what had to be obvious to every person on the planet other than my dad was that my mom was just as ridiculous about him as he was about her. He could have served her a bowl of cold spaghetti-os and given her a dandelion from next door's lawn (our lawn, obviously, didn't have any) and she would have been perfectly happy as long as she could hold his hand on top of the dining table and look into his eyes while she ate. My mom was 90% of the time the instigator for my parents' horrible and constant PDA, but I don't think she actually would have cared if all of my dad's hair fell out or if he quit it with the home gym; when my dad was on a work trip she would happily spend hours with her Bluetooth earpiece in, just chatting to him while she went around the house doing other stuff. My brother and I had actually banned our parents from watching movies with us because my mom almost always started amiably bickering about the plot or the characters with my dad, to the point that I wondered how she could be discussing the movie when she hadn't paid attention to any of it—until I started to understand that she just felt it was more interesting to talk to my dad, even about total nonsense, than to watch any film ever created.

This is not even to mention my mom's nightmarish habit of going into our gym room, aimlessly picking up some two pound dumbbells for a few minutes, and then announcing that she was going upstairs for a shower, at which point my dad would mysteriously also go up the stairs as though drawn by magnetic forces and then neither of them would reappear for at least half an hour.

So ultimately, my parents were weird, but at least they were equally weird about each other. I didn't realize until I was a teenager that not everybody's parents embraced every day after work like one of them just came back from war, but mine sure did. If you took either of them to a social event without the other one, guaranteed they would a) be checking their phones shamelessly and b) manage to work references to their spouse into every single conversation. Like literally, someone could tell my mom that they were about to go on a mission to Mars and my mom would say, "That's so interesting! You know, my husband, Edward, was reading a book about Mars recently."

The only time I started to worry about their marriage was when I was in junior year and my dad stopped playing the piano. He was insanely good at it, and my mom loved it when he played for her as one of his big romantic gestures, so the continued absence of the piano playing got worrying, and the longer it went on the longer there seemed to be a general aura of not-quite-right-ness between the two of them.

I was thinking about it while I was helping my dad fold laundry one weekend, and then he sighed, set down his folded towel in the basket, and then sat down on the edge of the bed and patted the space next to him.

I sat, and he said, "Honey, are you worrying about something?" This was something else weird about my dad: as I said before, you couldn't get anything past him. He didn't always call you out on it, but he always knew if something was wrong.

"I guess so," I said. I couldn't lie to him, but I also didn't want to say something that would end up with him telling me there were marriage problems between him and my mom.

"Is it about the piano?" he said gently.

"I guess so," I said again, playing with my fingers.

He took one of my hands in his and squeezed it in reassurance. "I'm sorry we made you worry," he said. "It's only a small thing, but I have a bit of arthritis in my hands now, and it's not as easy for me to play. It doesn't have anything to do with your mother and me."

"Oh," I said, blindsided. "I thought that was usually for older people."

He nodded. "Often it is, but there are lots of types of arthritis, and some of them can start earlier. My case is fairly mild, and I might not even have noticed it if I didn't play. I can take medication for it if I need to, but right now I don't need to."

I thought again about his hand holding mine, and I felt slightly dizzy. My dad had always been so totally capable of handling any situation—my mom often teased him by saying he was "good at everything," but it was basically true. He had always been able to help me with any homework I had, he could speak like five languages, he knew more than my history books did. This was the first time my dad had ever told me he wasn't able to do something.

My dad let my hand go instead and put his arm around my shoulders. "It's all right to feel a bit weird about it," he said. "But you really shouldn't worry. It's only a small thing. All just part of being human."

"Okay," I said, leaning into his shoulder. "No worries." I didn't want to make him feel worse about it, and I could only imagine how much he'd hate not being able to play for my mom when she loved it so much. "Thanks, Dad. You know, you're good at this dad stuff."

"Thank you, honey," he said, squeezing me closer. "I had a really good teacher. Don't think that'll get you out of the rest of this laundry, though," he added in a lighter tone.

He was obviously talking about Grandpa Carlisle, who according to my mom and my dad had basically been a saint in human form. There was a whole other weird thing about my family: they kept reusing names, and it got really confusing.

So my father's biological parents had died when he was little, but his adoptive parents had been Grandpa Carlisle and Grandma Esme, both of whom my parents always spoke about with total reverence. They had both passed away when I was little.

Grandpa Carlisle and Grandma Esme also had a whole bunch of other adopted kids, in addition to my dad: Emmett, Rosalie, Jasper, Alice, and another Carlisle, who was named after my grandpa (clearly, Carlisle and Esme didn't believe in giving kids boring names). My parents didn't seem particularly close to my Uncle Emmett, Aunt Rosalie, or Uncle Jasper, since we didn't hear from them much, but apparently they had both been really close with Aunt Alice, who had been my mom's best friend and, I thought, seemingly my dad's as well. I was always hearing stories of legendary Aunt Alice, who had planned my parents' fancy wedding with brutal efficiency, but there was also a sadness mixed in with the stories, because Aunt Alice had passed away when I was little too.

As for Uncle Carlisle, my parents seemed really close to him as well, and in particular my dad seemed to call him for advice; I talked to him on the phone all the time when he called us, and he seemed to deserve the name, because he was just as nice as I imagined Grandpa Carlisle to be. It was just too bad that Uncle Carlisle worked at a research outpost in Alaska, so we never managed to meet up with him in person, and video calls didn't really work either.

Then, on top of this, Uncle Carlisle had named his daughter Alice, after his late sister, my Aunt Alice. Cousin Alice was at college in the Netherlands, but she called us pretty often, in addition to messaging me, my brother, and my parents fairly often at random times about random things. Alice was really nice too—very cheerful—but I wondered sometimes if it was usual for a college-aged girl to message her uncle, aunt, and kid cousins so often (and Alice was a shameless triple-texter). It was hard for me to say; my step-uncle Seth had kids too, but they were too young to be on WhatsApp, and I didn't have any other cousins.

The point was that my parents had really liked Grandpa Carlisle (whom my father called by his first name), and they really liked Uncle Carlisle, and they had really liked Aunt Alice, and they really liked Cousin Alice, but they never named them properly when they talked about them, so they were constantly having conversations about "Carlisle" and "Alice" doing this or that and leaving me and my brother to ask which Carlisle and Alice were being talked about and what time period this had happened in. It was unbelievably frustrating.

Even my brother and I were a continuation of this habit of naming people after other people, although I, thank God, was not also named Alice, but rather Elizabeth, after my dad's bio-mom. My brother, who was a year younger than me, was AJ—Anthony for my dad's middle name, and Jacob for a friend of my mom's who I thought might have been an ex-boyfriend, which was also kind of odd.

Anyway, the evening after the laundry conversation, I got a typically random WhatsApp message from (cousin) Alice, which in this case was a link to a women's magazine article about how women should buy men flowers. I wrote her back asking if this was romantic advice for me, and she wrote back, "No, silly! For your mom!" as if that were obvious.

Yet another weird thing: my parents had some kind of ongoing joke where they told us "never to bet against Alice," and they always wanted to know about the random things that Alice messaged us, no matter how seemingly inconsequential they were. It almost seemed mean-spirited sometimes, like a joke at Alice's expense, but my parents never seemed to say it in that tone, and they always spoke about Alice in general with a lot of affection.

So I forwarded the message on to my mom (why hadn't Alice just sent it directly?), and the next weekend my dad came back from the grocery store with my brother to find my mom in the kitchen blushing and holding an immense bouquet. "What's this?" he said, looking bemused. "A secret admirer?"

"Oh, for goodness' sake, Edward!" my mom said, her face almost hidden behind the huge arrangement. "They're for you! You're always doing all these things for me. I just wanted to say—I can't write you a symphony or read a poem to you in Italian—but I would write I love you in big letters in the sky if I could." She held the flowers out to him. "I hope you like them."

I honestly thought my dad was going to cry. He put his grocery bag down (which, I noticed, he was carrying by holding it to his side rather than by its handles) and stepped forward to run his hand very gently over the assortment of flowers. I couldn't recognize most of them by sight; I was willing to bet my mom had gone through some flower language book and picked every single one for its deep meaning. It also occurred to me that my parents had been married for over twenty years, and my dad, despite practically keeping our local florist in business, had probably never received a floral arrangement himself for all that time.

"I love you so much, Bella," my dad said.

I knew at this point it was time to escape the kitchen ASAP, but I also knew that any worries I had about my parents' marital troubles were at an end. Alice had been surprisingly, or not-so-surprisingly, right on the money.

Please review! I'm considering making this into a longer story if there's interest. Thanks for reading!