Page 103 of The Night We Lost Him

She started to laugh. “Look at who is becoming predictable in his old age.”

He turned to her and smiled. “Well, you look pretty tired tonight anyway.”

“A woman loves hearing that.”

“That’s not how I meant it,” he said. Then he leaned over and took her hand, kissed her on the palm.

“Forgive me,” he whispered.

And, like that, he wasn’t just talking about tonight. He reached into his coat pocket. And he pulled out a ring. It was the same ring he wanted to propose with on the night before she left for graduate school in California. It was a ring he had almost pulled out a dozen times since.

“What are you doing?”

“Asking you to be my wife.”

“Oh, for crying out loud. You’ve got to stop this. I’m fine.”

He was quiet. She didn’t want to hear him. She did look tired, though. He would fight that battle later. He would call her doctor. He’d check in with Elliot too. He would insist she take more time off.

He gave her a smile. “It’s not too late.”

“I won’t have it. This kind of regret. Let’s just say we did the best we could and leave it at that.”

“Don’t you want to just do it already?”

“Do what?”

“I want to wake up with you every day,” he said. “As many days as we have.”

She drilled him with a look. “Must we do this, what, every six months? Every year?”

“I wish you wouldn’t minimize this…”

“You’re the one minimizing it by suggesting we should be a different way.”

He met her eyes, trying to figure out how to best make his case. How could he explain it? It wasn’t that he needed it to be another way between them. It was that he needed her. Always had.

“Ask me when I bought this.”

“No.”

“Please ask me.”

She tilted her head, took him in. “No. Because you’re just going to give me an answer that makes me want to not be mad at you anymore, and quite frankly, I’m in the mood to be mad at you. It’s cold out here and these shoes were an error. And the family is watching us through the window. The mom looks suspicious. And look at the little boy. He wants to know why two old weirdos are standing outside his house. We’re going to make him cry.”

She stepped off the curb.

“Let’s go.”

“I bought it the day after we met,” he said. “You walked out of my bedroom wearing that green dress and I bought it the next day from Mr. Parker on Avenue A for eighty-five dollars and fifteen cents.”

She turned back to him.

“That’s why I wanted to come back here tonight, to ask you what I should have asked you then.”

“The day after we met? That would have gone well.”

Cory stepped back onto the curb. Then she reached out, ran her finger around the ring. The band. There wasn’t a diamond there. There wasn’t even anything to look at. It was just a band. A gold-plated band. It wasn’t even real gold all the way through. Mr. Parker took pity on him by discounting it.