Slightly Engaged (35 page)

Jack looks at me. “Are you okay?”

“I’m soaked.”

“So am I.”

“These shoes kill.” There. One-upped him.

“Yeah, they look it. All that dancing couldn’t have helped the situation.”

“It was a wedding. People dance at weddings.”

“I danced,” he protests.

“Once. And it was a slow song.”

“Did you really expect me to get out there and do the YMCA with you and a horde of guys wearing Village People costumes?”

“They only wore them for that one song. And you always do the YMCA at Yankee Stadium.”

“That’s different.”

“I don’t see how.”

“It’s a ballpark, not a wedding.”

My throbbing feet are making me crankier by the second; thus I feel compelled to say, “Look, I know you hate weddings, Jack. But it’s over, so can’t you just cheer up?”

“I’m cheerful,” he says mildly. “You’re the one who’s not cheerful.”

He has a point there.

But who can be cheerful when half a can of Aussie Spritz is plastered to her head in sopping strands?

“And anyway,” he goes on, still watching the approaching traffic for a cab, “who said I hate weddings?”

“You did.”

“When? I never—”

“Remember Labor Day weekend? Our Lady of Everlasting Misery?”

“Oh, that.” He lowers his hand to wave it dismissively at me. “I hated everything about
that
wedding. Mostly the bride.”

“Hey, there’s a cab!” I say as one races past us.

Jack raises his arm again to hail it. Too late, it’s gone.

“I can’t believe it,” I wail.

“I’m sure another one will be along any second.”

Yeah, right. But I need to steer him back on topic, so I say, “Anyway, you were saying…?”

He just looks at me.

“About how you don’t hate weddings?” I prod.

“Oh. Right. I really don’t hate them. Not all of them. I like some of them.”

“You do?”

“Sure, why not?”

“You do not. You complain every single time we get an invitation to one.”

He laughs. “Okay, I’ll admit that I can think of better ways to spend a Saturday afternoon.”

I find myself blurting, “Maybe you’d feel differently if it were your own wedding.”

There’s no excuse for that comment. I didn’t drink more than a few sips of champagne at the wedding, and tight shoes don’t force words out one’s unwilling mouth.

But it’s too late to take it back, so I wait for Jack to tell me not to bug him about getting married.

He doesn’t say that, though.

He shrugs and says, “Who knows?”

Well, he sure as hell doesn’t.

I sure as hell don’t, either.

That does it. I’m so sick and tired of this tiptoeing around the issue when I know damned well he has a ring that he hasn’t given me for whatever reason.

Maybe it’s not because I ate tainted oysters.

Maybe it’s not because he didn’t want it to be on a cliché occasion like Christmas or Valentine’s Day.

Maybe it is because he changed his mind, or because…

Because, I don’t know, he’s waiting for hell to freeze over?

Truly, I have no idea why he’s waiting, and I don’t care.

All I know is that I’m sick of feeling helpless.

So I’m marching over to his court and snatching the ball back, as it were.

I look him in the eye through the curtain of sleet falling between us. “I don’t believe you, Jack.”

“You don’t believe what?” he asks, startled.

“I don’t believe you have any intention of ever getting married. To me.”

There. It’s out there, dangling in front of him like a bully’s dare.

What’s he going to do with it?

Well, what
can
he do?

What do I
want
him to do?

It’s not as though I expect him to get down on one knee in the slushy gutter and produce that familiar white ring box from his suit-jacket pocket.

No, I don’t expect anything like that.

Which is why, when he drops to one knee in the slushy gutter and produces the familiar white ring box from his suit-jacket pocket, I nearly fall off the curb.

“What are you doing?” I gasp.

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“It looks like you’re proposing,” I say incredulously.

“You always were quick on the uptake.”

He snaps the ring box open. The diamond setting I saw in that closet in Anguilla twinkles invitingly.

But this isn’t how it’s supposed to happen.

Not here, in the gutter on West Broadway.

This can’t really be happening.

“Tracey, I love you,” he calls above the noise of the street: honking horns, splashing cars, distant sirens, subway trains rumbling below.

“Oh my God.” I close my eyes, shocked.

When I open them again, he’s still there, asking, “Will you marry me?”

This is really happening.

“Will you?” he repeats, as another empty, on-duty taxi roars by, this time dousing him with gray spatters.

“Have you been carrying that ring box around all day?” I ask incredulously.

“Tracey, I’ve been carrying this ring box around for almost two months, trying to find the right moment to do it.”

“And this…” I gesture around us at the sleet, the traffic, the passersby, his knee squarely planted in a streaming gutter beside a storm drain. “This is it? This is the right moment?”

“I didn’t think so,” he admits. “But then I realized, no moment is ever going to be perfect. Nothing ever is. Perfect, I mean.”

“No,” I say, shaking my head, feeling tears springing to my eyes. “Nothing ever is.” I tilt my face up to the sky, and the tears are washed away, just like that.

“I love you,” Jack says again. “I want to marry you, Tracey. I’ve wanted to marry you for months. I would have asked you on Thanksgiving, or Christmas, but Hans took so long to make this setting because he had to have carpel tunnel surgery…”

“Hans?” I echo, my heart beating a little faster.

“He’s this jeweler my sister knows. He told me to call him to see if it was done over Christmas so I could at least give it to you for New Year’s, but it wasn’t, so—”

“His name is
Hans?
”

Jack nods.

“Is he Austrian?”

“German, I think. Why?”

“Does he live in Sheepshead Bay?”

“Flushing. Why?”

I shake my head, grinning, crying at the same time.

Once upon a time, I thought Jack asking me to marry him was about as likely as the actual existence of the little old arthritic Austrian jeweler from Sheepshead Bay.

So the jeweler has carpel tunnel, is German, and from Queens.

And Jack just asked me to marry him.

“What are you smiling about?” he asks from the gutter below.

“I’ll tell you someday.”

“Why don’t you tell me now?”

“Because I have something else to say to you now,” I tell him.

“Really?” He grins broadly. “What’s that?”

“It’s yes,” I say.
“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes…!”

Yes.

I Will.

Yes.

I Do.

He stands and takes me into his arms, lifting me off my pointy pumps and spinning me around joyfully before he kisses me.

The only thing that could make the moment more complete would be if a chauffeured limousine stocked with towels and champagne pulled up to the curb.

Yes, with Hans at the wheel, I think, and giddy laughter escapes me.

I kiss Jack again: Jack, who has been carrying this ring around for weeks, waiting for the perfect moment to propose.

I think of how I’ve spent the last few months longing for him to propose at any given moment, and how it never happened.

Life, it turns out, is full of moments. None is perfect; all are fleeting; precious few of them are memorable.

Sometimes you just have to grab one and make it your own.

“Give me your hand, Trace,” Jack says gently, and I do.

I Do.

Yes.

I watch through flooded eyes as he slides the beautiful ring over my fourth finger.

I open my mouth to tell him how much I love it, how much I love
him,
but I’m too overcome with emotion to make a sound.

“It was my mother’s,” Jack says as we both admire it. “The stone, I mean. There are a couple of small inclusions, but Hans said you can only see the flaws when it’s under magnification.”

I find my voice in time to remind Jack, “Nothing’s perfect. Especially under magnification.”

His eyes meet mine. “No,” he says, “nothing is.”

And he kisses me again.

I’d like to say that limo pulls up to the curb then, or even just a cab.

Or that we walk contentedly off into the sunset together, me and my fiancé—my fiancé!

But the sun isn’t shining, there still isn’t a cab to be found, and my feet are starting to blister.

So we take the subway home, me and my fiancé, holding hands all the way, and you know what?

Some things really are perfect after all.

Part VII

October

Epilogue

Jack and I really do live happily ever after, as you might have guessed.

As for the long-awaited Spadolini-Candell autumn wedding?

Well, that’s another story….

SLIGHTLY ENGAGED

A Red Dress Ink novel

ISBN: 978-1-4268-3368-7

© 2006 by Wendy Corsi Staub.

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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, incidents and places are the products of the author’s imagination, and are not to be construed as real. While the author was inspired in part by actual events, none of the characters in the book is based on an actual person. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.

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¹
Life Without Cigarettes. Duh.