I always marveled at my wife. At the polished, sophisticated woman she was, explaining in articulate detail the statistics of underserved communities and the importance of their donations. And then she’d come home with me and put on her mud boots and go to Doug’s farm and help him deliver a goat or something. I loved that she was so squarely a Montgomery and a Grant.
Kevin Bacon trotted across the street ahead of us wearing the reflective vest Doreen had made for him. “There he goes,” Alexis said.
Kevin was our official town mascot now, allowed to wander Wakan with impunity. Tourists funded his escapades by sending Doug money via the Venmo on the side of Kevin’s vest in exchange for taking pictures with our famous pig. It was Doug’s most lucrative side hustle yet. He probably could give me the hundred bucks if I got him Monday off.
We crossed the bridge and started down the moonlit bike path under the apple trees.
“Huh,” she said, hugging my arm.
“What?”
“I could swear those weren’t blooming when we walked over.”
I looked up. She was right. The trees were in full bloom. I couldn’t remember either, though it seemed like something I would have noticed.
“Do you remember that night?” she asked. “When we were walking and the petals fell?”
I nodded. “Yup. The night with Liz and Jake. The night that you were going to tell me you couldn’t see me anymore.”
Even as far behind us as that was, it still made my chest get a little tight thinking about it.
“That was the night I think I realized I was in love with you,” she said.
“Well. That explains why you tried to give me fifty thousand dollars. I’ll take that now, by the way.”
She laughed.
“It was the night you gave me the heart rock,” she said, a little distantly. “The night of the spaghetti dinner, and I felt so loved and appreciated. I think I knew even then that I was supposed to be here.”
A few petals began to drift down as we walked. Like a gentle snow made of springtime.
“I was one month in and I would have given you anything. Even then,” I said, remembering how I felt. “And now I’ll always have you and I can’t even believe it’s real.”
She shook her head. “I can’t believe the universe sent a raccoon and fog to put my car in a ditch so I’d end up there hitched to the mayor.”
I gave her an amused glance. “Are you telling me that you, a woman of science, believes that God had nothing better to do than trap you in Wakan?”
She shrugged. “Maybe she didn’t. And the town gets what it needs, doesn’t it?”
“The town does get what it needs…”
She stopped walking and turned so she could wrap her arms around me. “I don’t like that you think of me leaving you when you think of that night. That night was magic to me. Most of it.”
I put her face into my hands. “We have a whole lifetime ahead of us full of magic nights. We don’t need that one.”
She smiled and I looked into her eyes and I saw everything. The rest of my life. I saw children and grandchildren and rocking chairs on the back porch of the house overlooking the river and two old people, dying on the same day because the world would never be cruel enough to make either one of us exist without the other.
The trees rustled in the wind, and petals floated down around us. They hovered in slow motion for a second time. The universe had dipped its snow globe again, just for us.
And we stood there in the magic, knowing full well what it was.
Don’t miss Bri’s story,
coming in Spring 2023!
Acknowledgments
Thank you to beta readers Jeanette Theisen Jett, Kim Kao, Terri Puffer Burrell, Amy Edwards Norman, Dawn Cooper, Trish Grigorian, Lynn Fialkow, and sensitivity reader Leigh Kramer.
Thank you to George and Yasmin Eapen. Thank you to ER nurse Terri Saenz Martinez, ER doctor Brian Lovig, and his wife, Mackenzie, who relayed my weird ER questions to her husband. Thank you to firefighter paramedic Suzanna Hales Keeran, Dr. Pam Voelker, and Dr. Christine Muffoletto for answering questions about life on call and working in a hospital. Thank you to labor and delivery nurse Liesl Burnes and OB-GYN Susan Tran for helping me get the delivery scene right. Thank you to domestic violence advocates Ashlee Anderson and Virginia Gonzalez, a former board member for DVSAS, for helping me write about domestic violence with sensitivity and understanding. Thank you to Sue Lammert, a licensed clinical counselor specializing in trauma, for helping me to understand the psychological impact of the abuse cycle.