"What was she asking?”
I think about what to give her, so I say, "She was asking if I had decided. She’s been waiting for me to decide. She knew on the night you came back to the brownstone with our daughter. She knew before I knew. She’s been waiting for me to ask her for the ring."
Maeve goes very still.
"The ring."
"Yes."
"You have a ring?"
"Yes."
"How long have you had a ring?"
"Forty-two days."
She lifts her head.
She’s looking at me. Her eyes are wet again. Her mouth is doing what it does when she’s hearing something she didn’t expect and processing it in real time.
"Forty-two days," she says. "You have had a ring in this house for forty-two days."
"In the nightstand. In a small velvet pouch. Six feet from your head every night."
She breathes. "Why didn't you ask?"
"Because you were not ready. Because ‘I’ was not ready. And I am going to ask you the right way, after the grand jury, with my mother and the family. The ring is for the asking with words. Tonight was the asking without."
"You knew," she says. "You knew I would say yes."
"I hoped."
"You hoped."
"I have hoped for fifty-five days."
She puts her face down on my chest again. Her shoulders move. I do not know if she’s laughing or crying. I do not ask. I run my hand down her back, the slow, careful pass of a man who has decided his hand will be on his wife's back for the rest of her life, and I wait.
She lifts her head again.
She says, "Tell me about the ring."
So I tell her about the ring.
I tell her it was my grandmother's. Her name was Kalliope. She came from a village in the hills outside Thessaloniki in 1948 and lived in Brookline for fifty-seven years until she died in 2005. She read the ‘Iliad’ in Greek and made me read it to her on her porch when I was eleven and her eyes had gone bad, and the reading was the reason I learned to love a thing the way Greeks have always loved Homer, which is the way you love a thing because someone you love loved it first.
My grandfather's name was Niko.
Niko gave Kalliope the ring on their wedding day in 1958.
On their twenty-fifth anniversary, in 1983, Niko had a Greek word inscribed inside the band, in a jeweler's shop in Thessaloniki, on the family's first trip back to Greece in fifteen years. He had it inscribed in secret. Kalliope didn’t know about the inscription until after Niko died. When she found out, she pulled the ring off and read the inside for the first time in twenty-two years, and she wept.
I tell her the inscription is one Greek word.
I do not tell her the word.
Kalliope wore the ring for forty-seven years until her death. It went to my father. He wore it on a chain around his neck. When my father was killed in 2010, the ring went to my mother. My mother has kept it in a velvet pouch in a dresser drawer for fifteen years.
