I worked steadily, methodically, in the pool of light from the screen with Baxter asleep against my feet, and somewhere between the savings account and the insurance policy, a memory rose up out of nowhere and stopped my hands on the keyboard.
Christmas, two years ago. David’s parents’ house, warm and loud and full of family, the smell of his mother’s cooking and the noise of his nieces and nephews. At some point in the evening, while everyone else was crowded into the living room arguing good-naturedly over the rules of a board game, Elaine, David’s mother, had drawn me aside near the kitchen. She had touched my arm, the way she did, and she had looked at me with a kind of soft, hopeful earnestness and said, I hope that when you’re ready, you’ll give David the chance to make things official. He loves you very much.
At the time, I had smiled and squeezed her hand and thought, how sweet, how old-fashioned, this dear woman still living in a world where the woman is the one who needs convincing. I had filed it away as nothing, as a mother’s gentle nudge, and I had never given it another thought.
But now, sitting alone at my kitchen table at nearly one in the morning with my whole life pulled up on a laptop, I understood that Elaine had not been making an assumption at all. She had not been old-fashioned. She had been repeating something. She had been telling me a story she had been told, and the story was about me, and it was not true, and I had smiled and thanked her for it.
I picked up my phone and I called her.
She answered on the fourth ring, her voice thick and disoriented with sleep. Sarah? she said. Is everything okay?
I need to ask you something, I said. And I need you to answer me honestly.
There was a silence on the line, the particular silence of someone waking up fully and quickly, sensing that something has changed. All right, she said.
