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Twenty-Six Years Before

When first saw the wedding bands, she cried. They were so plain, so ugly, so small. She’d been raised on a steady diet of princess stories, had attended her fair share of wedding masses. She’d been imagining her own nuptials since her first communion.

This wedding was going to be nothing like the one she’d conjured up. Everything was going to be cheap, done on the fly. She knew what people were thinking: shotgun. But it wasn’t birth she was racing against; it was death.

Her father had been diagnosed with stage-four kidney cancer six weeks earlier. In all ’s wedding fantasies, her father walked her down the aisle. When she told Brian about the diagnosis, he said they should get married as soon as possible.

had known she would marry Brian since that very first day. She’d been eating the burrito he’d brought for her on her work break when she’d looked up and just had a feeling that he was her future. If that sounded ludicrous, well, Brian claimed to have known even sooner than that, from the minute he’d accidentally chained his bike to hers. So it wasn’t like getting married now was a major pivot. But they’d had a plan mapped out. They both were applying to graduate school, him for biochemical engineering, her for speech pathology. After they finished, they’d get married, then buy a house together and start a family. “Getting married now is not our plan,”

she reminded Brian.

“Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans,”

Brian replied.

“I hope you’re not pregnant!”

’s mother said when she announced the rushed nuptials.

“I hope you are!”

said ’s little sister, Pauline. “I wanna be an auntie!”

“I’m not pregnant,”

said, her face coloring, because even though they’d been careful, theoretically she could be. They were having premarital sex, with protection, both things her mother strongly disapproved of. Probably marital sex, too, which would explain why her parents had only had two children, a decade apart.

“I can’t help you plan your wedding; I’ve got too much to deal with now with your father,”

her mother said. “Also, I’m afraid we can’t spare any money right now.”

“I’ll help you plan the wedding,”

Pauline said. “And I have twenty-three dollars from the magazine sale. You can have that!”

“Thanks, P,”

she said, hugging her sister, wondering how someone so open and loving could come from a woman as cold and closed as their mother. Even wasn’t naturally warm, and whatever warmth she did possess had come first from Pauline and later from Brian.

When she told Brian there was no money for the kind of wedding she’d envisioned, he said it didn’t matter. “We have our whole lives to be married. To throw parties and wear fancy clothes and buy jewelry. Your father walking you down the aisle is what matters.”

knew this was true. So she’d bought a dress, secondhand. She’d booked the church hall for a Thursday night, when the price was reduced. She’d chosen the cheapest catering package and hired a student to deejay. She’d forbidden Brian to buy her an engagement ring. Better to save for a down payment. Once they were married, they needed a house and neither wanted to waste money on rent. Graduate school would have to wait for both of them.

But the wedding rings. They were so plain. Thin and silver, which would tarnish.

“We’ll polish them,”

Brian said. “I’m sure we’ll get a little tarnished, too.”

But when she went to the jeweler to pick up the rings, she cried. It was not about the rings. Or just the rings. There was her father, so ill. She was losing him just as she was gaining Brian. It made her feel like one had caused the other. “Aren’t you always saying that God never gives you more than you can bear?”

Brian asked her. “Maybe God chose this exact moment to take your father because he knew you could bear it with me. We could bear it together.”

“You don’t believe in God,”

she had said through her tears.

This had always stood between them, her faith, his lack of it. He’d asked her if she minded that he didn’t believe in God—once, after they started dating and again before he proposed—and both times she’d answered honestly. Yes, she wished he shared her faith. But she also knew that she was meant to meet him. His locking that bike to hers was no accident; it was a miracle from God that she would not squander.

“I have enough faith for the both of us,”

she told him each time. And she believed this. But that didn’t mean she didn’t want nicer rings.

“What’s the matter?”

the jeweler asked, offering a handkerchief for her tears.

told him about her father’s illness, the bare-bones wedding, what Brian had said about getting a husband, losing a father. The circle of life. “Nothing is like I thought it would be, and this ring doesn’t feel special.”

The jeweler was sympathetic. “I’m sorry about your father. As for the ring, it’s not the metal or diamond or setting that makes it special. It’s the person wearing it,”

he said, before lowering his voice. “Don’t tell anyone my secret or I’ll go out of business.”

dabbed her cheeks, laughed a bit.

“I like your husband’s take. It’s the circle of life, on your finger.”

“But must it be such a plain circle of life?”

asked.

“What some people do,”

the jeweler replied, “is inscribe something on the ring, something meaningful and personal.” He smiled, adding, “It’s no extra charge.”

A week later, her father walked down the aisle. She and Brian exchanged the rings, unadorned save for what she’d asked the jeweler to engrave on them.

Four weeks after that, buried her father.

Later on, after they’d bought a house and Brian had started his business and they had, if not a lot of money, enough for the diamond ring she’d never gotten, Brian suggested an upgrade. But by then she’d grown to love the rings, round and plain and reminiscent of the links in the metal chain that had bound Brian’s borrowed bike to hers, Brian to her. The thought of taking off the band was unbearable. She told Brian she was happy with what they had.