If Addison Fuller could summarize her experience with drinking tequila, it would probably go like this: tequila gives you rug burn on your face, and a ring on your finger.

But to tell the story correctly, she would have to start from the beginning, before she’d ever laid eyes on Dr. Jack Stratton. It would go something like this…

Addy made a frustrated sound, and felt a little chunk of her worries slide away. As she wiped down the built-in bookshelves in the great room, she felt the weight of the past ten days melt away. Even the confrontation with Jeremy seemed like a distant memory.

Who cares if it was just last week? she thought.

“Additup,” her dad sang from his La-Z-Boy, which was perpetually parked in front of the television. “Take a break! You’re making me tired just watching you.”

“Then it’s a good thing you’re in a recliner,” she said with a laugh.

“It’s a holiday! It’s your day off, take a breather,” he said.

“But then who would pick up after you and Kenzie?” she asked as she moved behind him with a duster and squeezed his shoulder.

He shook his head and reached for a beer. It was his third one of the day, Addy noted. Drinking beer, yelling at the television, and scowling at social invitations was the trifecta of his life. He barely talked to anyone besides her and Kenzie.

“Where is Kenzie?” she asked, wondering where her sister had gotten off to.

Her dad just grunted and looked at the tv in front of him. Her fingers itched to pluck the beer can from his hand before he passed out and spilled it all over the living room rug. She resisted, though.

I’ll just wait until he’s passed out. It’s not like he’s going anywhere.

Addy had worried about the drastic shift to hermitdom after her mom had passed, but it had been three years now.

This is the new normal, she thought to herself. She couldn’t believe there had been a time when her dad had worked eighty-hour weeks getting his restaurant started.

“What do you think of checking out the fireworks this year?” she asked, though she knew it was pointless. “Dad?”

She turned around, but he’d already started to snore. Gingerly, she pried the beer from his fingers and put it on the table.

Just in case she might awaken him with her cleaning, she took her chores to the garage. There was a major project she hadn’t had time for, one that had been on her to-do list for over a year. Keeping the inside of the home clean had been the priority. As Addy began to look through the stuffed shelves, a box of binders shifted and nearly hit her head.

Carefully, she began to pull out the box. Her own handwriting pulled her back to the blackest of days, when she’d been thirteen years old. It was when her mom had first been diagnosed, and she’d started to track the signs and symptoms meticulously.

Addison clucked her tongue as she flipped through hundreds of pages of her neat handwriting. Her mom’s entire life, from the day of diagnosis to the day she died, was right here in bright pink and turquoise ink.

“Red and swollen lymph nodes today,” was scrawled on the page in her ten year old cursive. “Doctor says it’s usually not a sign of cancer.”

Yeah, well. Sometimes doctors can be wrong.

Tears began to threaten at the corners of her eyes as she pored over the binders.

“What are you doing?” she asked herself. She looked to the recycling bin and for a moment had a surge of empowerment.

What am I keeping these for? But she just couldn’t throw them out. Addy put the box back on the shelf. One day she would do it, but today wasn’t the day.

Once again, the garage was left for another day. In the laundry room, she sorted the clothes and began a new load. Addy moved to the refrigerator and started to rinse out old bottles of expired condiments and toss takeout food from the restaurant as the washing machine rumbled away.

Satisfied with the clean fridge, with the shelves wiped down and only healthy, unexpired options available, she sat down at the kitchen island and started to go through the bills.

Just as she wrote a check for the mortgage, her phone buzzed in her back pocket. It was her sister.

“Kenzie, what’s up?” she asked.

“Hey! What are you doing?”

“Paying the mortgage.”

“Ew.”

“Ew? I don’t pay, we’re all homeless.”

“Whatever. Anyway, I was calling to tell you everyone’s going to Dusty’s tonight for fireworks! You should come.”

“Everyone? Who’s everyone?”

“You know, everyone who isn’t a dinosaur but is of legal drinking age. C’mon, you never go out!”

“I never go to Dusty’s, you mean. There’s a difference.”

“No, I mean you never go out! You always stay in, doing the bills or whatever. And what’s wrong with Dusty’s? Dive bars are awesome.”

Addy sighed. Her big Fourth of July plans were to stay home and go to bed early, but Kenzie’s enthusiasm was infectious. Besides, her little sister was right. She didn’t go out anymore.

“Okay, okay,” Addy said. “I’ll come. What time?”

“Meet me there in like… thirty minutes after my shift.”

“Thirty minutes? Is that going to give you enough time to drop the deposit off at the bank on the way?”

“Oh my God! You never stop! Yes, Boss Lady, I’ll take the deposit.”

“Be nice or I won’t go.”

“Okay, okay! Bye Boss Lady, see you tonight.”

As Addy put the phone away, she was startled by a monstrous snore from her father. He timed it perfectly, right in conjunction with a ding from the washing machine. She switched the wet load to the dryer and began broiling vegetables for her father’s dinner.

The crockpot full of beef had started to permeate the entire house. As she prepped a chilled salad and kept an eye on the vegetables, a jolt of pleasure shot through her when she realized it would all be done at once—the beef, the veggies, the salad, and the clothes in the dryer.

Addison fixed a plate for her father and put it aside to cool. Everything else she stored in Tupperware and neatly stacked in the fridge. Addy looked at her watch. One hour to get ready. That was more than enough.

“Dinner’s on the table,” she said loudly to her father.

“Thanks, Jan. Love you.” It was the usual response from her father’s beer-laced sleep, but her mother’s name always made her wince.

She went through her closet carefully and considered every option. Jeremy would probably be there—with Shannon. Everyone went to Dusty’s.

What exactly does one wear to show your workaholic ex that he’s missing out?

She sighed when she found nothing besides work clogs, jeans and t-shirts. Addy padded down the hall toward Kenzie’s room, and stopped short when she saw her parents’ bedroom door open and the light on.

Her dad sat on the bed and absentmindedly ran his hand across the bedspread. He’d slept in the guest room on a small twin bed ever since her mom had died.

Addy knocked softly at the door. Her dad smiled up at her.

“Your mom loved the Fourth of July,” he said simply.

Her eyes immediately filled with tears. He almost never talked about her mom.

“Are you going out?” he asked.

“I-- I was going to meet Kenzie downtown, but I’ll stay and keep you company if you like. Dusty’s really isn’t my thing, anyway.”

He shook his head and looked out the window.

“There’s a plate for you in the kitchen if you’re hungry,” she said.

He didn’t reply and she tiptoed out of the room. It felt like an invasion on her part, like she’d stumbled into something sacred.

In Kenzie’s closet, she flicked through the designer jeans carefully hung on wooden hangers and sorted by wash. She flipped through and picked out a distressed, skintight jean skirt. Then she paired that with a tight knit tank top with an American flag embossed in gold on the front.

No one will accuse me of not being patriotic this Fourth of July, she thought.

She slipped into Kenzie’s navy blue ballet flats. Something was missing. She held her own gaze in Kenzie’s mirror and released her ash brown hair from its high ponytail, letting it cascade down her back. That was better.

As she drove to Dusty’s, she couldn’t get the image of her dad out of her head. He looked so lost, so small in that room. Yet she’d understood that he wasn’t being a martyr or stubborn. He’d truly wanted to be alone that night. It made her sad, though.

She had to park on the street three blocks from the bar. Even from that distance, she could hear the music as it blared into the night.

The bouncer, a quiet boy she’d gone to school with, nodded at her and she began to weave her way through the packed crowd. Most of them were local drillers and their families, vaguely familiar faces she’d seen at Target throughout her life.

Dusty’s was packed wall to wall, but Kenzie was easy to spot. Her sister had scored a table, of course, an arm’s stretch from the bar. Two pitchers of beer sweated on the table, and Kenzie was surrounded by people she’d never seen before.

“You made it!” Kenzie shrieked as Addy approached. She jumped up and hugged her tight. “Lemme get you a drink. Stella! Pour my big sister a drink. Here, I’ll introduce you—”

Kenzie named a few people she knew, but two she didn’t—Jack and Philip.

“And these two, they’re the new doctors in town. And they both look like they just walked off the set of General Hospital,” Kenzie said with a grin. She was already slightly buzzed. “Don’t they look so young!”

They did both look like movie stars, Jack with his dark hair and dark eyes to match, Philip with lighter hair and an easy smile that lit up the room. They were both tall and broad, dwarfing Addy when they stood over her and shook her hand.

“I’m twenty-nine,” Philip said with a laugh. “Hardly old.”

“That’s close enough to thirty,” Kenzie said. “But most importantly, they’re single. Be still, my heart.”

Philip gave her a warm smile and a nod, but Kenzie immediately pounced back on him. He was skilled at this whole thing, and knew just what to do with a much younger admirer, Addison could tell. But it was Jack, the brooding one of the pair, that made her draw closer.

Addy had never been good at these kinds of things. She clutched her beer like it was a life raft and settled onto one of the recently vacated barstools. It was still warm from the previous owner.

She sipped at the too-warm beer and looked around the table. When she scanned back to Jack, he looked at her openly. She both smiled and laughed silently at the awkwardness.

“Oh, I love this song!” Kenzie said as Halsey began to pour out of the speakers. “Come on, let’s dance!”

Philip jumped right up and let Kenzie grab his arm. Her entourage followed suit. In seconds, the table was nearly empty, save for Addy and Jack.

“Looks like it’s just the two of us now,” he said.

The accent. Oh lord, the accent. It was Australian, and properly heartstopping.

“Are we really supposed to sit around doing this until midnight?” she asked.

He laughed. “I dunno. This is an American holiday, so you’re in charge. But I think if we stick together, we’ll be able to make it.”

She blushed.

“I think you’ve picked the wrong American party leader,” she said.

“Well. It might also help if we get tanked.”

“Agreed. Do you like tequila?”

His eyebrows shot up, and even she was surprised at her own forwardness. But it was too late now. She grabbed his arm and dragged him to the bar. As soon as she stood up, the beer she’d sucked down shot to its full power. She was tipsy and emboldened.

“Four shots of Cuervo,” she said to the bartender, a girl she recognized from high school. The bartender gave her the staple nod of the town, the one that said, “I got you, because we’re in this thing together.”

“I’ll have the same,” he called. Addy laughed.

She chuckled. There was no way she could drink all that and still be standing, but she would go along with it. If only to keep Jack looking at her like that…