I remembered that trip to Maine. I remembered it in sudden vivid detail now, the whole weekend rearranging itself around this new information like iron filings around a magnet. The little inn with the crooked stairs. The cold beautiful water we were both too timid to swim in. The lobster we ate at a wooden table on a dock, our hands greasy and happy, gulls wheeling overhead. And I remembered one evening in particular, the last one, when we had walked out to the end of a pier at dusk and David had gone quiet and strange, and had stood looking out at the darkening ocean with an expression I couldn’t read, and had seemed on the verge of saying something several times before turning away and suggesting we head back for dinner. I had felt it then, some charge in the air, some sense that a moment had almost happened. I had told myself, sternly, not to hope, and I had been right not to, because no proposal came. Of course no proposal came. I understood now that he had brought his grandmother’s ring all the way to Maine, had carried it in his luggage the entire trip, and had, at the last, decided against it, and had then gone home and told his mother that I was the one who had gotten cold feet. We had come home from that trip and slid right back into our lives, and I had felt a small private disappointment that I had been too proud and too well-trained to ever mention, and he had watched me swallow it and had known exactly what I was swallowing and why.
Every time she asked him about it afterward, Elaine said, every time she gently wondered what had happened in Maine, David had told her the same thing. He said that I had panicked. He said that when the moment got close, I had gotten frightened and begged him to wait, and that he was respecting my feelings, honoring where I was, not wanting to rush a woman who wasn’t ready. He said it so many times, and with such a convincing air of wounded patience, that the entire family had simply accepted it as fact. It had become the settled truth about Sarah, the anxious one, the commitment-shy one, and David the good man waiting kindly at her side.
