I told her what David had said at dinner. I repeated his words back to her exactly, the way he had said them, the cold laugh and the useless piece of paper and your problem, not mine. I kept my voice level the whole way through, and when I finished, Elaine said nothing at all for so long that I pulled the phone away from my ear to check whether the call had dropped.
Then she said, very quietly, in a voice that had gone strange, he told us you were the one who didn’t want to get married.
I closed my eyes and pressed my free hand flat against the cool surface of the table. What, I said. Not really a question.
He said marriage made you anxious, Elaine went on, the words coming faster now, spilling. He said you got panicky about it. He said he didn’t want to pressure you, that he was giving you space, that he was waiting until you were ready. He said it for years, Sarah. He said he loved you too much to push.
And another memory surfaced, sharp and ugly, the way they were coming now, unlocked one after another. Two Thanksgivings ago, his sister at the sink, drying a dish, squeezing my hand in passing and saying warmly, you’re lucky he’s so patient. I had laughed at the time because I hadn’t understood what she meant, had assumed it was some general comment about David’s easygoing nature, and had let it float away unexamined. Patient. He had let his sister believe he was being patient with me. With my nerves. With my fear of a thing I had asked for over and over and been laughed out of every time.
My grip tightened around the phone until my fingers ached. On the other end, Elaine let out a breath that had gone shaky, and I heard her say, half to herself, oh, David. Oh, David.
And then she told me something worse.
Three years ago, she said, David had come to her privately and asked for his grandmother’s ring. His grandmother, whom he had adored, who had died when he was in college. The ring was an heirloom, an old European-cut diamond in a delicate setting, and it had been promised, in the loose way of families, to whichever grandchild married in a manner the family would have wanted. David had told his mother that he was going to propose to me, that he had it all planned, that he was going to do it in the fall during our trip to Maine. And Elaine, overjoyed, had taken the ring to a jeweler and had it cleaned and appraised so that it would be perfect when he gave it to me. She still had the receipt somewhere, she said. She still had a photo of it, cleaned and gleaming, that she had texted to her sister at the time because she had been so happy, so excited that her son had finally found his moment.
