I looked at myself in the mirror that night. I saw the stark truth. I was twenty-six years old, but I felt forty. In two years on the road I had seen people at their best and their worst. I knew that death waited for all, from the lone man in the nursing home to the crying baby birthed on the bathroom floor. It might take a while to get the baby, but it would get all of us in the end. It could be as sudden as a bullet to the brain or as steady as a metastizing cancer or slow as the decline of Alzheimer’s. I had no doubt that someday I too would be in a nursing home, left to die an undignified death. I just hoped I wouldn’t have to suffer, wouldn’t have to lie paralyzed in a stroked-out crippled body, unable to speak or move, but fully aware of the hell around me. The question was, what kind of life could I have in the meantime?
I was no Superman, that was for sure. No George Washington, Abraham Lincoln or Mahatma Gandhi. Certainly no Mother Teresa. I was who I was. Even though I went to church now, I would not have been surprised, should I have been killed, to find myself redirected at the great pearly gates. Sorry, buddy, not everyone gets to go through, and you, ahem, you have some stains on your record, though I do note a few stars. I’m sorry, your sins were just too great to outweigh them.
Yes, I stole a diamond ring from a dead woman, but it was a ring that had fallen off on its own, and I had, after all, taken care of the woman who had owned it. In a way, I may have been the closest living person she had left—the closest person to being family. I believe that she wanted the best for me. I believed that finding her ring was a sign and not a test.
I know that I was just making excuses, but I was hoping for leniency. Even the Governor, who’d gone to jail, had been let off for good behavior, and now even had a popular radio show and was making big money as a consultant. This was my last lift, I was sure of it.
I stood at Carrie’s doorway and rang the bell. When she opened the door, I could smell her lasagna and the marinara sauce that came from a recipe of her mother’s. I had asked her to cook dinner for us, and she had agreed on the condition I do all the dishes. She wasn’t a bad cook, but she had never learned to clean the kitchen as she went. On most occasions I preferred to go out, even if it cost me money, just because it took so long to clean up the kitchen after she cooked. But I wanted tonight to be ours alone.
After a dinner and a dessert of strawberries and brownies, which we ate on the couch while watching a Chris Rock video that had Carrie in hysterics, I drew her a hot bath and massaged her back. I lit a candle and it gave a red glow and nice scent to the bathroom. I excused myself a minute and came back with my hand behind my back. While she asked me what I held, I knelt before the tub and looked her over in all her large warm nakedness.
“I want to ask you something, but I want you to think it over. You don’t need to answer right now.”
“What?”
“Wait a minute, I have a little speech I have prepared.”
“You’re not going to ask me something kinky, are you?”
“No, no. Just relax and listen. I’ve been thinking about this for some time, and I’m just saying I want you to think about it as well. I don’t need an answer right now.”
She was looking at me like what kind of trick question was I going to ask her.
“Like I said, I don’t need an answer now,” I told Carrie, “But I’d like you to try this on.”
And I pulled out the ring, and slipped it on her finger as she held her stunned hand out, her mouth wide open.
“My God,” she said.
“Carrie, I’d like to you to make an honest man out of me. Will you marry me?” And I was shaking like a boy asking for his first kiss.
“Oh, Tim,” she said, “I don’t know what to say.” She looked at me, and her face changed completely, and I saw tears come from her eyes, and she reached for my neck and hugged me to her, hugged me like I was a teddy bear she would hold onto forever. “No, I do know. Yes, yes, I will. I will,” she said.
Later, after we had made love in her bed, a long slow love with her looking at me like I was a new man, and she rolled on her back and stared at that ring on her finger, she said, “Where did you ever get the money?”
I hesitated a moment, and then said, “Some things are best kept secret. I have been working a lot of hours.”
“I never thought anyone would marry me, that anyone would ever want to actually marry me. I’m a bitch, you know, and yet you still want to marry me.”
“I do,” I said, though I felt a little trepidation, like maybe I had forgotten something I should have remembered.
She just stared at that rock like all her luck was changed for the better.