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“You’re pretty close to your family?” I asked.
“Well, they’re certainly not the easiest people in the world, but then again, whose family is?” he said. “And yes. In answer to your question. I’d do anything for them.”
I shook my head. “Well, we’re not like that. Once my father left, my mother was mostly focused on whoever the new husband was. She tried the best she could, but she just wasn’t so focused on me, on our day-to-day life, on making our home . . . a home,” I said. “And with all the moving around after that, it was a little like I didn’t have one.”
“A family or a home?”
“Dealer’s choice?” I shrugged. “It’s probably why I travel so much now. At least partly. I don’t know how to do it another way.”
He was quiet for a minute.
“It all may be hard for you to understand. . . .”
“Well, what if I don’t try?” he said.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“What if instead of trying to understand all of it, I just agree to be on your mother’s side?”
I turned toward him. “Don’t you mean my side?”
“No, I mean your mother’s side.”
“I’m not following . . .” I said.
“I’ll just assume that whatever your mother did wrong, she did one thing great. That’s you. She figured it out enough to make you. I can overlook the rest. And you can have the freedom to feel whatever you want toward her. With no judgment.” Griffin kissed me on the cheek, slow, imprinting me. “I’ll still think she’s lovely.”
I started to cry. It was the most generous thing anyone had ever offered me, and he had done it without even trying.
“That’s a nice plan,” I told him.
He smiled. “I’m glad we have one.”
8
He asked me a month later. Three months to the day from when we first met. Three months. Ninety-one days. The other side of the winter solstice. A season had passed. But only one.
The question didn’t start as a proposal. He didn’t ask me to marry him at first. First he just asked me to go with him.
“It’s coming up,” he said. “I have to head back East.”
“When? ”
“Next week. We’ve talked about it.”
We had. We had talked about it, but I’d avoided thinking about it. January—an entirely different calendar year—had always felt so far away. Where was I going to be in January? I was living in a way that I couldn’t think that far ahead. I was living in a way where I couldn’t really think.
But now there we were again: sitting at the bar, after hours, two bar stools down from where we had been sitting the first night. Where it all began. People always say that things come full circle, but I think that’s not accurate. I think they just come very close. You find yourself almost back where you started, but you’ve moved slightly. Like evidence of the time that has passed, of the things that have happened. We were, physically, two stools over. And so I could see it, like a recently given-up promise: the image of myself, then, on the bar stool. Hiked up dress. Getting ready for it before I knew I was. The beginning of things.
“Now comes the harder part,” Griffin said. “We have to talk about what we’re going to do about it.”
“What we’re going to do about it?” I shook my head. “What can we possibly do about it?”
“I would stay here. I would stay here to see where things go. But I have to get back. I should be back there already, really. I’m finally getting the chance to have my own place. It’s what I’ve always wanted. Right off Main Street by the bookshop and the church.” He started to make me a diagram with his hands. “It’s a big opportunity for me. And you can write your column from anywhere, right?”
I shook my head. “I can’t.”
“Why? ”
