Instead, Neil said, “So did I, but I forgot the ring.”
“You forgot the ring?” Without realizing I’d been holding my breath, I suddenly burst out laughing. Thank God that’s all it was, I thought, along with, Guess I wasn’t the only one who’d been on an emotional rollercoaster all night. “Oh, Neil, honey! I’m sorry.”
“Wait right here,” he said. He finished shaking off his coat, threw it on a kitchen chair, and then disappeared into our bedroom.
When he returned, he asked, “Should I do the bended knee thing?”
“Better not. You don’t want to hurt your back again.” Our relationship had already reached past the romantic stage into the practical one. Perhaps it would have been nice if he had done it, but he’d already had his romantic evening botched and I couldn’t handle any more delays.
So he stood in front of me and opened the box. I sucked in my breath. The ring was as stunning as I remembered it at Tiffany’s.
He grinned that lopsided grin that I loved so much and said, “Allison James, will you marry me?”
“Of course!” I clapped my hands once and then kissed him on the lips.
We took the ring out of its box and he slid it onto my finger, sealing the deal.
Once it was secured on my hand, I asked, “Should we call our parents?”
“Nah, it’s late. Let’s just call them tomorrow.”
And, finally, we were engaged. Granted, it wasn’t the type of proposal you see in the movies. Nobody cried. No words of undying love and devotion were spoken. But with my PR spin, we still had a pretty good engagement story to tell.
As we recounted the story to our friends and family over Christmas, we did the full build up—the carriage ride, dinner, dessert—until we got home and “he had forgotten the ring!”
Ha-ha-has all the way around. But to be honest, I never really thought it was that funny. A part of me has always sort of wondered: If I hadn’t brought up the proposal that night, would we have gotten engaged at all? This doubt was easily drowned out by the noise and busyness of wedding planning, until now.
Because, unlike me, Jordan has to get up in the morning for work, we call it a night at ten, and she walks me home.
“So you still haven’t told me the plan,” she says. “What now?”
“The plan?” I press my palms against my temples as we walk. “I guess I have two choices: crawl under the covers for the rest of my life or make myself move forward.”
“Which is it?”
“Moving forward.”
“Good girl.”
Jordan gives me a sympathetic hug outside my building. “You call if you need anything, okay?”
“Thanks, Jor. You’re the best.”
BEFORE I CLIMB into bed, I consider taking off my beautiful ring and putting it back in its blue box. I decide not to. Even though it’s a physical reminder of Neil, so much change has happened in forty-eight hours that I just want one thing to remain status quo for the moment. I pick up my phone to set my alarm, but remember that there’s no point and set it down again. Then I cry the next batch of tears, but I’m not sure if they’re totally for Neil. There’s so much else to mourn—my dress, my ring, and, most important, the future we had planned—that I wonder if I’ll ever go to bed dry-eyed again.
A body in motion stays in motion. A body at rest stays at rest. Which is why I’m in a treadmill class at my gym at seven thirty this Monday morning. Staying in bed all day was obviously the preferable option, but this is my first official Monday of being unemployed, and I’ve decided to prudently stick to whatever routines I still have control over in my life. (Granted, I’m normally at the gym around six, so there is a bit of slacking going on.)
On my walk home, I follow my custom of stopping at Starbucks for my morning latte. Though I probably shouldn’t be spending the money (being unemployed and all), just like my daily workout, I still need this sense of normalcy in what is now my surreal life. When I reach the counter to order my usual tall almond milk latte, John the usual Monday morning cashier comments, “Hey, Allison. Late start today?”
“Hey, John. Yep. Late start. I’ll have my usual, please.”
His familiarity with me and my habits, which I usually find comforting, kills off my endorphins since I’m not too keen to explain that there’s no job to get started at, late or early, today.
Once home, and in no hurry, I take my time showering and getting dressed. I remember watching an interview with Hoda Kotb where she described that when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, she still forced herself to get dressed every day. My life as I know it might be over, but at least I don’t have a life-threatening disease; and so I repeat Hoda’s mantra “Get up, dress up, show up” to stop myself from reaching for my pajamas.
Clothed and caffeinated, I finally sit down at my kitchen table to face this morning’s first gut-wrenching task—canceling the wedding I so meticulously planned. Given that I love planning, especially a party for my family and friends, I had dismissed the idea of hiring a wedding planner. I deeply regret that past decision. With only one uncomfortable phone call to a wedding planner, this horrible task could be over with and the remaining invoices forwarded to Neil. For a brief moment, I think about going ahead with the reception anyway, minus the nuptials and Neil. I’m sure some spunky women would have the party and rebrand it as a Suddenly Single Fest. I, however, am not one of those women, and the fewer witnesses to my failure, the better. So instead, I open up my laptop and pull up my Excel file with the wedding vendors and plan to work my way through the list.
Thank god I told my mother that Neil and I would pay for our own wedding. That’s probably the only decision in this whole mess that I’m thankful for right now. Though my parents generously offered to pay, I knew that if my mother were paying, she would have had way more input than necessary into the planning; and by “input” I mean completely hijacking the whole operation. Even the horrible task of canceling my wedding contracts seems easier than accomplishing my other task for the day—making that phone call to my mom.
My mother grew up in a small factory town in Wisconsin, where her brother was the first in the family to go to college thanks to a military scholarship, but where there was no future for her other than becoming her mother—with no college education, working full-time for minimum wage, only to rush home to a second job of running errands, making dinner for the family, and cleaning the house while her husband relaxed with a beer after work. When she was eighteen, my mom visited her brother at the University of Madison where my dad was a law student at the time. They met at a party, got married after he graduated, and moved to Chicago. He got a job at a large law firm, she immediately got pregnant with my brother, and soon they were part of the crème de la crème of their suburban neighborhood. She had a husband who was a good provider, she could stay at home with her children, she could lunch with her girlfriends at the club, she could shop and decorate her house (while hiring others to clean it), and she was grooming me for what she considered “the happy life.” Though she’s never exactly voiced it, I suspect she takes my failure to follow in her footsteps as a personal failure of hers, and she deals with it by directing her annoyance with me at me.