This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here.

This was initially a companion series to the magnificent Jenny Trout‘s review of the original novel, ‘Beautiful Disaster’. Jenny has since stopped her review, not wanting to give McGuire any further publicity in the wake of her attempts to run for office.

Chapter Twenty-Three: Acceptance Speech

I hope, dear readers, that you will not be too shocked to learn that when Trav promised Abby that this Thanksgiving meal wasn’t ‘some stunt to try and get back together’, he was in fact lying. We have this unsurprising point confirmed for us in the second paragraph:

The plan was for her to play the part, start to miss me, and then maybe I would get another chance to beg her back. It was a long shot, but the only thing I had going for me.

Well, at least that last bit is true; it’s not as though he has charm, personality, or skill in bed going for him.

However, I did then get a pleasant surprise just a few paragraphs further on; when Travis’s father says he’s putting them in the guest room (apparently there’s a double bed in there), Travis does admit right away that it’ll only be Abby in the guest room and he’s going to sleep in his own bedroom. It’s the first time I can remember Travis not trying to push Abby into something.

Trenton does his bit of stirring by asking why they’re in separate bedrooms when of course he knows exactly why. Since he’s described as having a look of ‘disgust’ while he does this, which doesn’t quite go with the situation, I do wonder whether the bit about him having supported Travis through this was only added for this book and Maguire is trying to find a way to retcon this in.

Anyway, turns out there’s a problem because Thomas’s room is being used for storage so they’re short of a room. Abby reluctantly volunteers to sleep in the same room as Travis and makes some excuse about how they were just trying to ‘be respectable’. They get up to the spare room and Travis offers to sleep on the floor and Abby tells him damn straight he’ll be doing that.

I sat on the bed, realising just how unhappy she was about the situation. I guess part of me hoped she’d be as relieved as I was to be together.

Sigh.

The two of them go and start prepping the stuff for tomorrow, which is, apparently, all there already, so I guess at least someone went shopping for it. The other brothers arrive. Their dad regales them with stories of cooking disasters of attempted Thanksgiving meals in the past; apparently he just decided there was no point trying to cook meals after his wife died. Clearly a grown man can’t be expected to learn cooking skills. (And, all right, turkeys are notoriously difficult, but other foods exist, FFS. Last Christmas was my first since separating from my husband and therefore the first in which I’d ever had to do Christmas dinner myself; I got round the problem by finding a decent traybake recipe. Which I thought of as an option because I’d tried other traybake recipes in the course of actually cooking regular meals in the previous months because doing that was my responsibility as a parent. Which of course raises the question of what Jim was doing for dinner on the other 364 days of the year.)

Trenton wants to start a poker game but their dad puts his foot down about no gambling that weekend; he’s got the dominoes out instead. It’s not clear why, since he doesn’t know any of what happened with Abby, but under the circumstances it’s a damn good thing. This doesn’t seem to have occurred to Mr Sensitivity, who doesn’t really have any sort of reaction to it at all. He does say he’ll stay and finish helping Abby, but she waves him away telling him she’s nearly finished, so everyone just goes and plays dominoes and leaves her to it. Except we’re then told it’s half an hour until Trav hears the dishwasher start. So that doesn’t sound like ‘nearly finished’, that sounds like a bunch of menfolk leaving their supposed guest to do a lot of clearing up on her own. (We get absolutely no indication that anyone else thought to say ‘Hey, let’s all pitch in and then we can get the rest of this done in no time’.) I mean, points to Trav for at least offering, but minus points to the patriarchy.

Having got the meal prep done, Abby’s ready to head up to bed. Trav persuades her to stay and watch a film with the family, and she keeps up a not-very-convincing pretence to the rest that nothing’s wrong between her and Trav until she can go upstairs. They do finally go up to their room and Trav is actually doing a good job of being considerate, checking whether she wants him to wait outside while she changes and making up a bed on the floor. Good contrast to previous behaviour.

They have a poignant little conversation where Trav asks whether she did love him and she says she still does. Trav asks if he can just hold her for the night since it’s their last night together and Abby, after being clear about this not leading to sex, agrees. However, she then finds it too difficult:

“I . . . I don’t think I can do this, Travis,” she said, trying to wriggle free.

I didn’t mean to restrain her, but if holding on meant avoiding that deep burning pain I’d felt for days on end, it just made sense to hang on.

Oh, FFS, I’m even out of snark. Once again I’m actually liking the way Travis is behaving and then, wham, it all turns around. He’d rather keep forcibly holding her when he sees she’s upset by it than be upset himself. He’s treating her like a human teddy bear, and putting her through this crap because he can’t face telling his family how much he screwed up.

They have an angsty little conversation where he says he’ll never love anyone as much as he loves her and he knows he could never be good enough for her, to which I would have sharply replied ‘Well, then, start thinking about how you can be better for the next person. Goodnight.’ But, to be fair, that is middle-aged me with decades of life experience.

Travis is woken early next morning by the sound of Abby in the kitchen, getting the turkey into the oven with what he describes as ‘commotion’, which conveniently doesn’t seem to wake anyone else. It’s freezing cold and they snuggle back under the covers together and look out at the snow outside.

I pulled my mouth into a half smile, and then leaned down to kiss her lips. Abby pulled back and shook her head.

“Trav . . .”

I held on tight and lowered my chin. “I’ve got less than twenty-four hours with you, Pidge. I’m gonna kiss you. I’m gonna kiss you a lot today. All day. Every chance I get. If you want me to stop, just say the word, but until you do, I’m going to make every second of my last day with you count.”

And, of course, this is once again treated as sweet and romantic instead of one more round of boundary pushing from a man who has already been told no. Abby starts kissing him and they end up having sex and he keeps on kissing her throughout the day. Wow, thanks for those great ‘she didn’t really mean it when she said no’ messages.

The meal comes out really well. Their father tells Abby that she’s ‘a Maddox now’ and that he expects her at every holiday, which I’m sure was meant to sound warm and welcoming, but, even allowing for the fact that he doesn’t know they’ve split up, is waaaay OTT for a couple of teenagers who’ve been dating for a few weeks. Trav’s brothers do cleanup duty (about time they did something) and Trav sits and massages Abby’s feet for her. We get one of the rare good lines in the book:

Abby did love me, but she also cared about me too much to send me packing when she should. Even though I’d told her before that I couldn’t walk away from her, I finally realised that I loved her too much to fuck up her life by staying, or to lose her completely by forcing us both to hang on until we hated each other.

And not only that, but it’s followed up by, if technically not quite an apology, a really good apologetic speech:

“I don’t know what happened to me in Vegas. That wasn’t me. I was thinking about everything we could buy with that money, and that was all I was thinking about. I didn’t see how much it hurt you for me to want to take you back there, but deep down, I think I knew. I deserved for you to leave me. I deserved all the sleep I lost and the pain I’ve felt. I needed all that to realize how much I need you, and what I’m willnig to do to keep you in my life.

“You said you’re done with me, and I accept that. I’m a different person since I met you. I’ve changed . . . for the better. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to do right by you. We were friends first, and I can’t lose you, Pigeon. I will always love you, but if I can’t make you happy, it doesn’t make much sense for me to try to get you back. I can’t imagine being with anyone else, but I’ll be happy as long as we’re friends.”

“You want to be friends?”

“I want you to be happy. Whatever that takes.”

Abby jokes that she bets he’ll be thanking her when he meets his ‘future wife’, and then says she’s ready to go home. Trav takes her back to the dorm and actually leaves her there without hassling her, then goes home. Trenton’s already told his family about the breakup and they all rally round and support him (and give him more whiskey because terrible coping skills, but nothing’s perfect). So, in an unprecedented event, I got an entire consecutive two and a half pages of this book that I actually quite like. Even better, this brings us to the end of another chapter.