Page 158
It isn’t a question, but I answer it like one. “With everything I’ve got.”
“Then you have my blessing, and her mother’s. Welcome to the family, Luke.”
We hang up.
I sit at my kitchen table for a long minute, holding a phone that just gave me the easiest yes I’ve ever gotten to the hardest question I’ve ever asked. It wasn’t the call I braced for. But I’ve got the blessing. Which means there’s only one thing left standing between me and the rest of my life.
I need to make sure I’ve got the ring right.
Harper answers on the last possible ring, the one right before voicemail, in a burst of noise, a dog barking, something clattering, Micah’s voice asking a question.
“Luke? Luke Baker? Why is Luke Baker calling my—” A pause, and I hear the exact moment it lands. “Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Are you…”
“Harper…”
“Micah!” She’s not talking to me anymore. “Micah, Luke is calling me.”
“Harper, can you—”
“Is this the call? Is this the ring call? Please tell me this is the ring call, I have been waiting for this, I called it, I told Micah, I said that man is going to—”
“Harper.” I hold the phone a few inches off my ear until she runs out of runway, which takes a while. “It’s the ring call. But I need you quiet for about ninety seconds, and I know that’s a lot to ask.”
She goes still. It is, I suspect, physically painful for her.
“I want to get it right. You’ve known her since college. I’ve known her six months. I could go to a jewelry store and buy her something big, and I’d do it happy, I’d empty the account. But that doesn’t feel like her, and I don’t trust myself to know, so I’m asking the person who does. What does Olivia actually want?”
Harper’s quiet a second, which is its own kind of miracle, and when she talks again the loudness has gone out and something truer’s come in.
“She wants simple. She’d tell you simple, and she’d mean it, and she’d be a little bit wrong. Because Olivia doesn’t actually want simple. She wants meaningful. Those look the same from the outside, but they’re not. Don’t get her a big showy rock she’ll feel like she has to live up to. But don’t get her a plain nothing either, because she’ll tell herself that’s all she deserves, and she’ll be wrong about that too.” A breath. “Get her something that means something. She’ll take meaning over money every day of her life.”
And that’s when I ask the question I’ve been building to this whole call.
“What if it was my grandmother’s ring?”
Harper doesn’t say anything.
“Dottie pressed it into my hand ten days ago,” I tell her, into the silence, because now that I’ve started I want to say all of it. “It’s hers. Hers and my grandfather’s. Fifty-one years they were married, until he passed, and she wore it every one of them. It’s small. Gold, worn soft, four little diamonds, nothing you’d look at twice in a case. It’s all my grandfather could afford as a young man with nothing, and she never once wanted a bigger one.”
The line is silent so long I check the screen to make sure the call didn’t drop.
“Harper?”
“I’m here.” Her voice is wrecked. “Luke. She would adore that ring more than any diamond you could buy her in any store on this earth. Do you understand what you’re about to give her?”
I do.
Fifty-one years. Two people who couldn’t afford a thing but a small gold band and four little diamonds, who stayed anyway, all the way to the end. Dottie’s the proof. Dottie’s the whole proof, the one who stayed when everyone else in my life ran, and now she’s handed me her own wedding ring to give to the woman who taught me a person could learn to stay too.
“Yeah,” I tell Harper, and my voice isn’t steady and I don’t care. “I understand.”
We talk another twenty minutes, or Harper does, plotting, weeping, threatening to drive up early, swearing herself to a secrecy I trust about sixty percent. By the time we hang up I’ve got a co-conspirator an hour and a half away, and a blessing from a house in Houston, and there is nothing left standing between me and Saturday.
I sit in my kitchen and let myself feel the size of it.
My phone buzzes.
Olivia
