In July, we decided I would move in with Erik when my lease was up, and little by little, I moved bits and pieces of my home into his. Clothes, art supplies, a few boxes of kitchen things and bed linens, a beveled glass water pitcher I used for flowers, a beautiful cigar box of my dad’s where I kept the photos of Lucy. My orange teapot. The dining room table with its huge claw-foot legs, where I worked on my collages. Margaret wanted my couch; everything else was getting hauled to Goodwill. It surprised me how pared down my life had been before Erik. “You never realized?” he asked. “I noticed the first time I saw your apartment. It’s like you were afraid to make a mark on anything.”
“I probably was.” The less I had, the less there was to lose. Sometimes I wondered if this was my real attraction to collage: a way to save things no one else wanted.
We went to Kopp’s on the one-year anniversary of our first time there. Our farmers had just left, and I was staring down the road, thinking of how much my life had changed, of how miraculous it all felt, when Erik set the small velvet box on the picnic table. “What—” I started to say, then stopped, eyes darting to his face.
He nodded, then said, “I want to marry you, Claire.” Behind him the sun disappeared below the tree line, the sky different shades of blue.
“Are you…” I’m not sure what I was asking. I was suddenly nervous. “How long have you been planning this?”
“Since the first night we came here.”
“You’d just met me.”
“I already loved you.” He grinned. “I just didn’t know it yet.”
Behind us a child wailed and a woman said, “You’re not going to get any custard.” A breeze moved through the pines. He snapped open the lid, and the colored Christmas lights reflected in the small diamond. I felt my eyes fill, and from the next table a man called, “Hey! Congratulations!” and someone else said, “Yeah, he just gave her a ring,” and then Erik was sliding it onto my finger, and tears were spilling down my face, and around us a handful of strangers was clapping.
Pentimento. I’d been here before. We both had. Nick holding out a ring on the beach during the Fourth of July fireworks. The boom of the ocean and the sky exploding with light and color. I was twenty-two. I felt my real life was just beginning.
And Erik: He’d proposed to Annabelle the year after her mom died. They’d believed their marriage would heal her, begin to soften the grief that had defined her life for so long.
Driving home, we were quiet. Neither of us believed in fairy tales or happily ever after; neither of us believed getting married would solve our problems. There was sadness in this, but hope too, immense hope, because we did know better, and maybe, maybe, we thought, that knowledge could protect us.
I phoned my mom the next morning. I was on Erik’s back deck in my running stuff, the sky still dark. “Perfect timing,” my mother said. “I just got my coffee.” I heard her take a sip. “It’s early. Is everything okay?”
“Everything’s great. Erik proposed.”
She didn’t answer, and for a moment I thought she hadn’t heard me. “Mom?” I asked, and then realized she was crying.
“Oh, Claire,” she said. “I feel like the world is finally right. First our girl and now this.”
Our girl. My eyes burned. “Is it weird to think they’re somehow connected?” I couldn’t help thinking that it was because Lucy was okay that I was allowed to be happy again.
“It’s not weird at all,” my mom said. “It seems connected to me too.”