After her daughter was accepted into the top-ranked university in the country, my sister-in-law—ex-sister-in-law—took up the habit of disagreeing with me about things I wasn’t even trying to agree on, call them observations, which people could agree or disagree on, I didn’t care. But my sister-in-law did start caring mainly because she wanted to prove that I knew nothing about anything, given that somehow she’d discovered I had not been accepted into the top-ranked university, which I did indeed apply to, unsuccessfully, many years ago, albeit knowing full well even back then that I had no chance in hell of getting in.

Call it the old college try.

Whenever I would see my sister-in-law, the minute I made an observation about anything, she’d pull out her smartphone to fact-check it immediately although my observations could be fairly nuanced and not exactly black-and-white observations that a smart-ass smartphone could adequately assess.

Besides teaching summer classes at the community college, this was partly the reason I had never visited my sister-in-law’s beach house before. My wife Celeste, on the other hand—ex-wife—whom I met at the state university, had been going to her sister’s beach house every summer ever since my sister-in-law bought the place after she and her crooked husband Arty won the lawsuit against the city.

Which brings me to Tony Ferrar’s Christmas party.

While at the beach house this past summer—my first and last time—when the topic of the niece’s baby shower came up—ex-niece—I happened to mention that Celeste shouldn’t fly, let’s call it, “Top Ranked” airline because it’s overrated. That was my observation. It was not something I was necessarily looking for anyone to agree on. The observation was based on my many nuanced conversations with Tony Ferrar about him getting stranded because his Top Ranked airline flight was delayed by “mechanical” problems after the Top Ranked airline pilot was whisked away by the police, and how the Top Ranked customer-service representative lied about a replacement flight (-slash-pilot), which never materialized, causing Tony to have to shell out X amount of dollars on another airline (which shall remain unnamed) just to get himself back home again.

I chose not to mention Tony’s failed lawsuit against Top Ranked airline, whose lawyers—no doubt graduates of top-tier law schools—were masters at quashing lawsuits of loyal customers like Tony. I didn’t want my sister-in-law thinking she was smarter at lawsuits than he was, my best man and the graduate of a totally respectable law school.

But Celeste did mention it.

And the second she did, you can guess who searched the internet and announced that Top Ranked was the highest rated airline in the entire world—whatever that means—a non-nuanced observation if I ever heard one, which to me could not be trusted.

My sister-in-law and I did not share epistemologies.

In any case, this was why Celeste blamed Tony Ferrar for missing the baby shower and why she didn’t want us going to his Christmas party.

Which is where I met Marie.