“Oh,” he said sadly, looking down at his feet.
I had ruined everything. Again. I had ruined it when I left for LA and Mark left for college, when he had pursued the plan, taken the basketball scholarship, and I, instead of choosing electives and picking out a roommate, had hopped on an airplane, found a waitressing job and an agent. And now I had done it again. Tears of guilt puddled in my eyes as Mark stood up, looking so forlorn that I wanted to pull him back down and say,Just kidding! Of course I’ll marry you!Then we could revisit the skinny-dipping plan I had formulated earlier.
But he was already walking away. If I had to guess, I would bet tears were puddling in his eyes, too, and he didn’t want me to see.
The moments that followed felt like something out of one of the movies I’d shot. With the sun high in the sky over the water and the farm grass up well past my ankles, this place seemed so foreign yet so familiar, this landscape such a piece of my past yet so unimaginable in my future. I could hear children’s laughter reverberating across the acres. I couldn’t help but smile, despite the tears coming down my cheeks.
I thought back to earlier that week, when my sisters and I had been talking about my future with Mark. I’d been sitting quietly with them on Caroline’s front lawn, arms wrapped around my bent knees, neither of them saying anything. That’s the thing about my sisters. Caroline has a big, giant mouth, and sometimes you think she’ll never shut up, but she also knows when to just sit with you and rub your back. In the world’s grandest ironies, she’s quite nurturing.
With tears coming down my cheeks, I choked out, “I don’t know what to do. Whatever choice I make, I’m giving up something I love.” I had thought I was upset then, and the proposal hadn’t even happened yet. It wasn’t even real.
“I just don’t understand.” Sloane had finally piped up. “This isn’t the 1950s. Relationships aren’t cookie-cutter. If Mark doesn’t want to live in LA, then fine, but I feel like there has to be some way to travel back and forth and work this whole thing out.”
Caroline slid her arm through mine and rested her head on my shoulder. “Mark wants a really traditional relationship. If you don’t, that’s fine, but pretending you can gloss over that is kind of naive and silly.”
I thought of my sisters that day as I trailed behind a very upset Mark, the wildflowers almost up to my knees. Life holds no guarantees, as my sister Sloane well knew after the hell she had been through these past few months.
Love was rarely easy, and sometimes it meant sacrificing something, even a piece of yourself. My sister Caroline could tell you that after the months she had spent trying to repair her relationship with her cheating husband. As the sun hit my eyes, making me squint, I realized that life was never going to be perfect. Not even mine.
I thought of my mom, of Jack, the man she had loved so much but given up in favor of my father, of us, really, since Jack never wanted children. I wondered if she regretted that decision, if she wished she had chosen him first instead, if she wished she had compromised more for love.
I thought of Mark, of how wonderful he had been these past few weeks as I dealt with doctor appointments and blood work to figure out why I was so tired and dizzy and why I seemed to bruise like a peach. He knew I might have aplastic anemia, that bone-marrow transplants and blood transfusions might be a reality of my future, and that children—as much as it broke my heart to think so—might not. I thought of how he’d stood by my side through all of that, how he’d come through for me while Grammy was dying.
And as if the breeze had carried in my answer on its wings, I knew exactly what I had to do.
“Mark!” I called, running behind him, the grass and dirt on my bare feet cool and soothing. He didn’t turn. “Mark!” I called, feeling myself get out of breath, reminding me that just because we hadn’t named it, that didn’t mean I wasn’t sick.
He finally stopped and turned to look at me, and I could see the pain in his face. But even still, when I reached him, he couldn’t help but wrap his arms around my waist.
“Mark,” I said softly, smiling up at him. “I think I’ve had enough time.”
“What if I’ve changed my mind now?” he asked, grinning boyishly down at me.
“You can’t change your mind.” I shook my head. “There’s no turning back now.”
“There’s not?”
I shook my head again, trying to be myself, trying not to slip into the character of a bride saying yes. I kissed him softly. “Mark, I love you. And I know you love me, too. And there are some things—some big things—for us to work out. But I believe that the two of us can get through whatever life throws at us.”
Mark picked me up and spun me around in the air and kissed me again. “We can make it through anything,” he said, setting me down and sliding the ring onto my finger.
I nodded and grinned. And I hoped like hell that it was true.
THREE
ansley: chopped liver
Thirty seconds earlier, all I had been able to think about was the email I found when I inadvertently opened my daughter Emerson’s MacBook Pro instead of mine. The email on the screen from Park Avenue Hematology and Oncology that said my daughter’s test results were back. It had made my blood run cold. Something might be wrong with my daughter. I stared at the screen. I tried to convince myself that it was nothing more than run-of-the-mill anemia like I had in my twenties. But as a mother, I’d become an expert at having thoughts that spiraled completely out of control. That part of me was certain it was terminal cancer.
Moments later, when I heard Emerson calling “Mom!” from the front porch, I ran out to confront her, to find out what she had been keeping from me, with my little dog, Biscuit, in my arms. But when I saw the look on her face and Mark standing beside her, when I heard her calling her sisters, too, I realized this was not my moment.
When she squealed, “We’re engaged!,” her blue eyes flashing, an entirely new set of worries flooded in.
Now, twenty minutes later, I sat stock-still while Jack paced nervously around the living room. I wasn’t sure exactly why he was nervous. It was sweet that he was so concerned for Emerson even though, unlike Caroline and Sloane, she wasn’t even biologically his. But this reaction seemed disproportionate. If someone was going to be nervous, shouldn’t it be me, the mother of the bride?
I took a sip of the champagne that Caroline had poured for all of us before my girls left to tell their friends the good news.
I sighed. “He didn’t ask me for permission, Jack. What does that say about him? I mean, sure, he couldn’t ask Carter. But what am I? Chopped liver?”
