I am not a sentimental person by nature. Even when commercials with heartrendingly cute kittens come on the television, I try my level best to remain stoic. That’s just the way I’ve always been. But during the bridal shower there was, um, an incident.

At the very end of the gift-unwrapping session, my mom slipped me two packages. The first package contained a funky yellow vase to be used for the table centerpieces at the wedding. The second package was mysteriously long and shallow. I carefully lifted the lid and proceeded to be ten kinds of confused. It was a… necklace? With plastic animal print beads? But some of the beads had… words on them?

I lifted the necklace out of the box to get a better look, and everybody else said, “Ohhhh!” They were very good at that, actually. It’s like they had practiced in advance. I had begun to believe I could pull a half-eaten tangerine out of a gift bag and the entire party would make noises like I’d just scratched off the final number of the winning Lotto ticket.

But they all said, “Ohhhh!” and I had just begun murmuring politely about it being a very lovely necklace when I suddenly realized that there was a word on one side of every bead, and the words spelled something out. I found the starting bead and began to read aloud:

“My shower gift to you is your choice of a necklace to wear with your wedding gown.”

They’d made this, my mom and dad. It had been my dad’s idea to begin with.* They’d gotten the beads from Micheal’s and printed up the words on little clear round stickers and built the damn thing themselves.

I was a jellied, damp-eyed mess.

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* Which, knowing my dad, is a minor miracle in itself. His skills do not lie in the delicate arts. The one time he tried to make a cake, he was bending over the oven checking to see if it was done and he burned himself on the pan, causing him to shout, “Ow! This baking shit is hard!” To this day, I cannot bake anything without being reminded of that quote.