“I really love you,” he said.
“Aw, thanks,” I said with a slight undercurrent of Duh. “I love you too.”
John soldiered on. “No, I really love you.”
“Molner, I really love you too.” Why is he being so weird?
“I really love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you,” he said.
“Of course! I want to spend the rest of my life with you too!” I said sweetly.
Then something crazy happened: He stood up, got down on bended knee, and opened up a small green leather box.
“Couric,” he said exasperatedly, “I’m trying to ask you to marry me.”
In the box was a sparkly cushion-cut diamond encircled by smaller diamonds staring me in the face. The exact ring I wanted if this day ever came.
My confusion showed in a series of “What?”s. Finally, Molner said, “Well, you haven’t answered my question.”
I knew I wanted to marry John, but I had totally given up on the possibility of it ever happening. So I was in a state of semi-shock.
Finally, I said, “Yes, of course. Yes!”
We stopped by my friend Charlie’s house. After years of listening to sob stories about boyfriends gone bad, she deserved to be one of the first to hear the news. Chatting with her and her husband, Ralph, about nothing in particular, I waved my hands around a little more than usual.
“Wait!” she said finally. “Wait! Is that an engagement ring on your finger?”
“Yes!” I shrieked. We all laughed and hugged. It started to feel more real and right.
John hadn’t told a soul what he was up to. On the drive back to the house on Amy’s Lane, we saw Andy and Tom taking a walk. John slowed down. When we shared the news, we high-fived and cheered. Then I saw catering trucks rolling up and waitstaff with linens and chafing dishes moving in. John had arranged a feast and had invited some of our closest friends. Ellie, Carrie, and their boyfriends were running late, thanks to bumper-to-bumper traffic. Suddenly, panic. Ellie and Carrie don’t know yet. Oh my God.
I wished he’d talked to them first. My fantasy was the guy in the Kay Jewelers commercial asking permission to marry Julie, when the camera suddenly cuts not to Julie’s dad, but to her young son.
When the girls arrived, I asked them to meet me in the sunroom. They looked so confused when I walked in, sitting close together on the sofa. I decided to rip off the Band-Aid and flashed my ring. “What do you think, guys? John and I are getting married.”
They both burst into tears. Not the happy kind.
Ever since he met them, John was careful not to impose himself on the girls—if anything, he held back, because he didn’t want them to think he was trying to be their father. And I wondered if those good intentions were backfiring now—if that self-imposed distance made Ellie and Carrie think he didn’t care （which couldn’t have been farther from the truth）。
“Don’t worry,” I said, looking into their tearstained faces. “Nothing’s going to change!”
Losing their father so young, they’d been through so much, and I couldn’t bear thinking I might be putting them through more.
I knew there would be bumps in the road as we integrated our families, but I was determined to make it work. For everybody.
JOHN WAS STILL in a frustrating cycle of feeling fine and feeling lousy. In the fall, he called me from his apartment and said he was lying on the bathroom floor, unable to stop vomiting. Ugh—more food poisoning, I figured, or maybe the flu again. I wanted to help him out, but the truth is, I was too distracted by something else: Carrie, now 17, in her senior year of high school, suddenly went from being a healthy teenager to dangerously sick.
Complaints of back pain turned to fever—which led to a Cipro prescription that didn’t work and a fever spike of 104…me carrying a pajama-clad Carrie downstairs, putting her in a cab, and racing 20 blocks to the emergency room. An IV drip…temperature of 105…the words concerns of impending septic shock scribbled on her chart…blood pressure plummeting; a powerful antibiotic that we desperately hoped would fight the bacteria in her bloodstream. Doctors fearing organ shutdown…This can’t be happening…God, please help Carrie…
The sheer terror, the acute sense of aloneness being a single parent…When John called in the middle of it all to tell me he wasn’t feeling well, I just didn’t have the bandwidth to help. The best I could do was have a friend drop off some saltines and Gatorade at his apartment.