He stiffens too. “I mean—I wasn’t—”
“Okay,” I say. “We could do that. The getting married thing.”
Silence. His thumb’s gone still. The crickets are deafening. Even the breeze has fled.
And then, “Okay.” And his thumb starts up that circle again.
“Wait. Really?” I prop up on one elbow, which is extremely difficult in a hammock. His eyes are too shadowed for me to see but he lifts his head and kisses me softly, meltingly, drawing me back against him and then settling me in the crook of his neck.
“I’ll marry you,” he says…
I stand up off the bench and board the train that’s just pulled into the station. I hold the bar and sway, staring into nothing. A realization is hitting me in slow-speed stages. I’m thinking of Vin. Of how he phrased that. He didn’t sayLet’s get married.OrWill you marry me?(which would have been odd, considering I had pretty much just proposed to him). He’d said,I’ll marry you.
The phrasing of that reminds me of something. It’s catching at the edge of my brain. I can’t fit the puzzle piece into the puzzle.
I’d wondered for years if I’d sort of cornered him into agreeing to marriage. Like I’d made it too awkward for him to say no…
But on our fifth anniversary I finally cracked and told him I’d been worrying about that. And I’ll never forget what he said. That those eight months had been the longest of his life. That he was waiting to get to a year before he proposed because he worried I’d be freaked-out if he brought it up earlier.
What was it that Deb said about Italian American men? They’ll die for you but won’t talk about their feelings?
Vin never would have brought that up about our proposal if I hadn’t come to him with tears in my eyes.
That’s the way he is.And he always has been. And I never used to mind it.He doesn’t say a lot…but maybe he says it all.
We pull into Grand Central, I get service, and my phone ding-a-lings. It’s a text from Vin blinking up at me. A photo he’s taken in the condiments aisle at the grocery store. A blurry close-up of jars of miso.
Did you need red or white?his text reads.
A warm confusion starts to spread over me, like waking up from a nap in a puddle of sunshine.
He doesn’t say a lot but he says it all…And suddenly that puzzle piece clicks into place. I recognize the phrasing ofI’ll marry you.
I’ll marry you.Said to me in a hammock a decade ago.
I’ll go.Said to me outside Raff’s door just weeks ago.
Theyshouldfeel like bookends, but they don’t. I can’t explain it, but these two sentences, said by the same man, in completely opposite circumstances,feellike they mean the same thing.
I try a door inside my heart. I expect it to be locked, but the doorknob circles freely under my trembling grip. The nameplate on that door? It reads: You’re Missing a Crucial Piece of Information, Roz.
I thought I’d understood it all and that there was only one possible reason for that lease. That my version of the story was certainly his version of the story because there could only possibly be one version of the story. But he’s texting me from the condiments aisle because he…gives a shit about me getting what I need. Which, even though everything else is different,isVin in a nutshell…And always has been.
I try the door again.
Still open.
Still free.
Still mine to step through.
So, what is Topic Roulette?
(Pick a topic out of the hat and then tell the first story that comes to mind!)
With no preparation? Jeez. You are hardcore people. Okay, then. My topic is—Oh, for the love of God.
(What is it?)
