"He does," she said, with the absolute certainty of a woman who had made the man. "He does." Her thumbs moved along my cheekbones, lightly. "You're a good girl."
My eyes filled with tears.
"Thank you," I managed.
She held my face for another moment. Then she patted my cheek once, twice, the way grandmothers patted cheeks in Caton's Chapel, and let her hands drop.
She looked at Tommy.
"Marry her," she said.
Tommy looked at me.
I looked at Tommy.
"Yes, ma'am," he said. His voice had finally come slightly loose at the edges. "That's the plan."
We stayed two hours.
The fog came back, gentle, the way it always came back, and Elaine drifted back into the quiet of herself.
We played one more song—something old, a hymn she'd had on one of the records, something Tommy knew the chords of in his sleep—and she closed her eyes and her face went peaceful and the afternoon light came through the west window long and gold and we sat there and played it through twice and let the second time be the ending.
Deb came to the door.
Tommy kissed his mother's forehead and said something low that wasn't for me and she smiled with her eyes still closed. We gathered our guitars, and we left.
He proposed on the drive back to the airfield.
We were in the high desert with the enormous sky going orange at the edges the way it went orange out here, all the way down to the horizon with nothing in the way. The car was quiet and I was leaned against his shoulder the way I leaned against him now—naturally, without deciding to, because it was where I fit—and he said:
"Rebecca Lynn."
"Yeah."
"I have something in my pocket."
I lifted my head and looked at him.
He reached into his jacket and produced a ring box. Small. Dark blue. He held it in his palm between us and looked at me with the focused, serious expression that I had loved since a restaurant on a winter afternoon when he'd crouched on the floor for my guitar.
He opened it.
The ring was not flashy. It was not the kind of ring that announced itself. It was a round diamond, modest and perfect, set in a thin band of gold that had an antique quality to it, the look of something that had been made by someone who cared about the making.
"It was my grandmother's setting," he said. "I had the stone reset. She was a woman who'd have liked you."
I looked at the ring.
I looked at him.
"I'm not going to give you a speech," he said. "You know who I am by now. You know the whole inventory—Valentine, the Army, the brothers, the FBI, the mess that comes with any of it. You've been in an explosion for me and you've been in asurgical suite for me and you've sat in a memory care facility in West Texas and played Dolly Parton with me for my mother." He paused. "You said you'd follow me anywhere."
"I said that," I confirmed.
"Did you mean it?"
"I meant it."
