I asked C. to marry me on Ash Wednesday. It was an accident—not the asking, the timing. The asking had been on my mind for the better part of two years. I had known I would someday do so since midway through our second date, and for a long time, both of us had talked about the future in terms that made it perfectly clear we planned to share it. As a practical matter, though, it had first come up when my father was in the hospital, dying. One day, after we had been sitting with him for hours, C. took me outside for a walk. It was a breezy, beautiful afternoon, and the vivid contrast of life outside the ICU—the seagull sound of young children at play, the spray from that fountain I liked gusting sidewise into rainbows, the windblown canopies of maple trees alternating green and silver against a brilliant blue sky: all this made me register, for the first time, that my father was truly going to leave this world, that whatever happened in it from here on out would not be seen by him. I could not say out loud what I felt, but it must have been obvious, because C. put her arms around me and told me that if I wanted to, we could go procure the necessary paperwork and get married in his hospital room. I knew what she was offering, and I understood its generosity and gravity, but I shook my head into her shoulder. I did not want to marry in haste, for any reason; I did not want her family and all of our friends to miss the occasion so that my father could share it, if indeed he still could; and I did not want—although in this I really had no other choice—to mingle so much sorrow with so much joy.
So we did not wed that week, or say anything more about it for some time. But later that fall, I called my widowed mother and told her that I was planning to ask C. to marry me. She was thrilled, but she laughed out loud when I told her why else I was calling. I didn’t think C. would want a conventional engagement ring, I explained, but I wanted to give her something meaningful from our family, and I wondered if my grandmother—my mother’s mother, that fierce force of nature who had died at ninety-five—might have left behind any appropriate jewelry. My mother told me that I was welcome to all of it but that she couldn’t imagine I would want any of it, and immediately I saw her point. My grandmother had been exceptionally glamorous in her day; she had Amelia Earhart bravura and Elizabeth Taylor looks, but although she was about as patrician as a middle-class Jew could be, her taste in jewelry ran to things that could be admired from down the block. My mother was right: there was no way C. would want to be seen in any of it. I was still registering that reality and thinking about other options when she said, quite serenely, Why don’t you give her Daddy’s wedding ring?
My father’s wedding ring: the last time I had thought about it was in the hospital, when my mother, warned about possible swelling in his hands, had preemptively removed it and put it in her purse. It was identical to hers, and unusual. Although my parents were not remotely bohemian, they had gone in search of something unique when they’d decided to get married, and had settled on broad gold bands with a scalloped edge and a distinctive cable-like engraving. When I was young, I thought they looked like little crowns; as an adult, I found them somehow both ancient and art deco. Now I pictured C. wearing the one from my father—not as a ring but as a necklace, the V of it falling just below her collarbones—and could not imagine anything more perfect. I hadn’t thought to wonder what my mother had done with it since his death, but it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps she had kept it in her purse all that time, or placed it by her bedside, or started wearing it herself, and I worried out loud that surely she must want to keep it. No, she replied, I want C. to have it, and I know that Dad would have wanted that, too. I called up my sister, concerned that she might want the ring for herself, or simply not want it repurposed for any reason. There’s nowhere else I’d rather see it, she told me.
That Thanksgiving in Boston, my mother gave me the ring. Once I got home, I took it to a jeweler to pick out a necklace to go with it. My father had worn it continuously for forty-nine years—at work and at home, in the car and on public transit, while raking leaves and grilling hamburgers and taking out the trash. He had been twenty-five when my mother put it on him. He was seventy-four when she took it off. Life had grown on it, grown into it; for as long as I could remember, the grooves of the pattern had been charcoal, the surface a flat deep bronze. But while I was browsing, the jeweler polished it, and when he handed it back to me, my eyes filled with tears: it looked as it must have when my parents first saw it, the color of midmorning sunshine.
For months afterward, I kept the ring with its new necklace in my desk drawer, waiting for I’m not sure what—the right moment, the right occasion, the right mood. That February, C. and I both came down with one of those dreadful winter colds, the kind that makes you miserable in part by making you disgusting. We had low-grade fevers and deep racking coughs and seemingly endless quantities of mucus; when we woke up in the mornings, the sheets were clammy and our eyes were encrusted with microbial goop. By the third night, we felt too lousy to make dinner, or even remain upright at the table. Instead, we sat in bed, eating ramen, surrounded by used tissues and the empty capsule packages from daytime/nighttime cold meds. I felt exhausted and achy and unable to swallow and also, quite suddenly, overwhelmed by the desire to ask C. to marry me. Outside of early childhood, I had never wanted to be in someone’s company when I was ill. But I wanted to be in C.’s company all the time, even when we were both objectively repellant. I looked at her and felt a wild flare of adoration and gratitude and tenderness and even, improbable and impracticable as it was under the circumstances, desire. In sickness and in health, I thought: here at last was someone I knew I would cherish through both. I had just enough wherewithal to look around and keep myself from blurting out the words. Granted, I had never planned to go down on one knee in a rose garden in Paris; still, I realized, anything short of a trip to the landfill would be a more romantic way to propose than this. And so instead I touched her feverish cheek and blew my nose and, with difficulty, held my tongue.
I suppose it was partly the effort of doing so that caused me to propose when I did. Some weeks had passed. We were, at the time, in the middle of a top-to-bottom DIY renovation of our home, and that particular afternoon, we were upstairs in the guest room, laying new flooring. Eventually, C., who was planning to attend evening services, stripped out of her jeans and work shirt, went to take a shower, and emerged transformed, beautiful and a little bit solemn and dressed for church. I kissed her goodbye at the door and went back upstairs to inspect our progress. Almost half the floor was done; I looked at it and figured I could probably finish by the time she returned. I took a new batch of boards into the adjacent room, which we’d turned into a temporary woodshop, and trimmed them down to size. It took maybe three minutes. Then I walked them back into the guest room and set them down on the subfloor and in that exact moment it came to me that I must ask C. to marry me when she got home. The force of this feeling propelled me out of the room and into the shower. I scrubbed the grime and sawdust from my body, feeling clear and excited and nervous and ebullient, like something that had long been contained and was now on the point of release, a dove in a box or a horse at the post. Afterward I got dressed as if I, too, were going to church, and went downstairs to make dinner. We had pasta in the pantry, onions and tomatoes on the counter, fennel and feta cheese in the refrigerator; together, they became what I hope will be known forever in our family as proposal soup. I had just set the table and lit a candle when C. walked in the door, a cross of ashes on her forehead.