My hands flew to my mouth, and I could barely see the ring he produced from his pocket because my eyes were so glazed over with tears. But, oh, it was beautiful. He was beautiful. I thought for a moment about all those years, all that time I’d had to fight to keep myself away from him, first because of my husband, then because of my daughters. I wouldn’t have to fight that anymore. I would never again have to hold myself back. I could be with him the way I had wanted to be for all those long and confusing years. I could be with him in the dark of night or the light of day. I could be with him until I closed my eyes for the very last time.
It occurred to me to be scared or conflicted. But there was none of that now. Only the perfect clarity that on his knee before me was a man who had loved me for most of my life, who had been by far the most confusing and convoluted chapter of my life story but, in some ways, the simplest, too. Because when you sifted through the sins and the bad choices, the things we should have done and the things perhaps we shouldn’t have, it came down to one thing: that man had always been there for me.
So it was obvious what I would say. I pulled him up off the floor, wrapped my arms around him, and kissed him long and hard, like maybe it was the first time or maybe the last. I broke away and looked him right in the eye so that he would be sure to hear me, sure to know how serious I was, that all the confusion and the games, the push and pull, the ebb and flow, that had been our relationship for all these years had been worth it, that they had led us back to this same bar in this same city but with a different conclusion.
“I want to make sure that you hear me when I say this,” I said. “I love you with every ounce of who I am. I have loved you since the moment our hands met over that plate of brownies on the sandbar, and there hasn’t been one day since then that I haven’t thought of you. Sometimes I wish I could change the past, but I can’t.” I paused and took a deep breath. “You gave me everything, Jack. Even when we couldn’t be together, you still gave me the life I had always wanted.” I kissed him again and said, “There is some messiness for us to clean up along this road, but I want you to know that no matter what that looks like, no matter how it happens or how hard it is, I am going to be there by your side to make it right again. I am going to love you until the day I die, and then I will love you for an eternity after that. So yeah, Jack, I will. I will marry you any old time.”
It reminded me of a song that Vivi played in her room a lot, by a young man named Jason Mraz, whose content was sometimes a touch suggestive for me but whose voice I was awfully fond of. One of his lines went, “It’s like taking a guess when the only answer is yes.” It finally made sense to me now. Yes was not an answer. It was the only answer.
Jack laughed and picked me up in the air and kissed me again. “You will not marry me any old time,” he said. “We are going to have a celebration to remember. It is going to be epic. Nothing less.”
I smiled and nodded. “OK, I can handle that.”
Then he handed me the ring. It was a gorgeous round stone in an antique setting with sapphires and diamonds. “So do you want this old thing or what?”
“Hell, yeah, I do.” We both laughed, and he slipped the ring on my finger. I held out my hand to admire it. “It is the most beautiful ring I’ve ever seen.”
He nodded. “I saw it in a window today, and I knew you had to have it.”
I could feel my mouth hanging open. “Are you serious? You just decided to propose to me today?”
“Oh, Ansley. I decided to propose to you forty-three years ago. It just wasn’t until today that I was pretty sure you’d say yes.”
We reminisced and drank champagne. I finally kissed him in that booth where we had sat all those years ago, where our story once had a different ending.
“I would like to show you my appreciation for this lovely piece of jewelry now adorning my left hand.”
He grinned. “I would like that very much.”
As we walked back out into the dark night, with fewer people on the street than there had been before, I said, “Don’t you think it’s kind of ironic that you didn’t want children so we didn’t get married, and then we had two children together anyway, and now we’re getting married and you’re going to have three daughters? And God only knows how many grandchildren?”
He stopped and pulled me close to him. “The biggest regret of my life is not wanting children back then. I spent years thinking that if I had decided to give you children, we could have been together all these years. We could have had this family and this life so long ago. I wasted so much time.”
I shook my head. “No, Jack. That isn’t it at all. This was how it was always meant to happen. I know that now.”
I felt a bit guilty in that moment. I tried to push it away, but I didn’t want this to diminish my life with Carter. Yes, I had loved Jack, and yes, there was a bad patch in there when I had contemplated throwing away my marriage for him. Aside from that, Carter and I had had a terrific life together. Before he died, I had been sure that he was all I would ever want in this world, that we would be together until our dying breath. But his dying breath had come sooner than I had anticipated.
But then I smiled again. Because this wasn’t a time to feel sad or guilty. This was a time to feel happy. Elated. Life had given me a second chance.
When I saw Mark sitting on the steps of the Plaza, alone, I couldn’t help but wonder if Emerson had rethought the second chance she had given him.
I rolled my eyes at Jack and mouthed,Really?We’d had, what, two hours of peace?
Jack sat down beside Mark, and I sat down beside him.
“Trouble in paradise?” Jack quipped.
Mark put his head in his hands, and that was when I realized he was crying. And I kind of felt sorry for him, even though in my heart of hearts, I thought he had been a touch obnoxious lately.
“I am never going to be enough for her,” he said. I was sure my daughter was somewhere very upset right now, which worried me.
Jack and Mark were talking, but I wasn’t even listening. I was just admiring the ring on my hand and feeling grateful.
Sitting on the steps of the Plaza that night, I felt like everything happened for a reason, like someone had put these puzzle pieces together in a very specific way to make sure that we ended up where we were supposed to be. For a moment, a beat of a beat, I couldn’t help but feel like maybe God hadn’t forgotten about us after all.
EIGHTEEN
emerson: a little like love
