On the drive home that night, Greg asked me something.
“Do you think she’ll get tested?”
I looked out the window at the dark highway.
“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s her choice to make. Not ours.”
He nodded slowly.
“Not ours,” he repeated, like he was learning a new word.
Sophie called us two weeks later. She’d been to see a genetic counselor at the university health center. She’d done a lot of reading. She’d talked to her friends, and her roommate, and her favorite professor.
“I’m not getting tested,” she said. “Not yet. Maybe not for a long time. The counselor said a lot of people wait. Some people never do it. I want to finish school first. I want to live my life for a while without knowing. And when I’m ready, I’ll decide.”
“That sounds very wise,” Greg said.
“I’m a very wise person,” Sophie said. “I get it from Mom.”
Elliot came for Thanksgiving.
He showed up on our front porch on Wednesday afternoon with a pecan pie from a fancy bakery in Tampa and a bottle of wine that probably cost more than our turkey. He stood there on the doormat looking nervous, like a kid on his first day of school.
Greg opened the door.
For a second, they just looked at each other. The same eyes. The same jaw. The same cowlick.
Then Greg pulled his brother into a hug so hard that the pie almost ended up on the porch.
“Thank you,” I heard Greg say into his shoulder. “Thank you for not listening to me.”
“Somebody had to,” Elliot said.
Sophie took one look at her uncle and burst out laughing.
“Oh my God,” she said. “There’s two of you. There’s actually two of you.”
That Thanksgiving was the loudest one we’d had in years. Lynn came with her husband and her kids. Patty came over for pie. Elliot told embarrassing stories about Raymond Cole’s terrible singing voice, and Greg laughed so hard he cried, and I realized it was the first time he’d ever heard a single funny story about his own father.
That night, after everyone had gone to bed, I found Greg and Elliot sitting together on the back porch in the cold, looking at old photographs Elliot had brought. Raymond Cole as a young man in the Navy. Raymond Cole fishing on a lake in Ohio. Raymond Cole holding a baby that might have been Elliot. And one very old photograph, black and white and torn at the corner, of a tall young man holding a little boy in a pair of overalls on his knee.
“That’s you,” Elliot said quietly. “Mom found it in his things after he died. He kept it in his wallet for thirty years. She never knew who the boy was.”
Greg held that photo in his shaking hand for a long, long time.
I went back inside and left them alone.
Things have been hard since then. I won’t lie to you about that. Greg retired in January. Some days are good. Some days are very bad. Some days he gets angry and says things that aren’t really him, and then he cries and apologizes for an hour. Some days he drops his coffee cup three times before nine in the morning, and we both just laugh and get the mop.
We bought plastic cups. Lots of them.
We go to a support group on Tuesday nights at the hospital. We’ve met other families who are walking the same road. A man named Pete whose wife was diagnosed at forty. A young woman named Carmen who is taking care of her father the way Carol once took care of Raymond. We sit in a circle of folding chairs and drink bad coffee and tell each other the truth.
And every single Sunday, June calls me from Oregon.
“How’s my boy?” she always asks. She calls Greg “my boy” now, even though she’s never met him.
“He’s fine,” I tell her. “Some days he’s fine. Some days he’s not.”
“Well,” she always says. “That’s marriage, sweetheart. That’s just marriage.”
One year after I went on that cruise by myself, I went on it again.
This time I wasn’t alone.
Greg walks with a cane now. His hands shake more than they used to. Sometimes he has to stop in the middle of a sentence and wait for the word to come back. But on our first night at sea, he put on his navy suit and his good tie, and I helped him with the buttons on his shirt, and we walked into the dining room together arm in arm.
Arnel was still working there. When he saw me, his whole face lit up.
“Mrs. Whitman! You came back!”
“I did,” I said. “And I brought my husband.”
He took us to a table by the big window. The same table. I’d asked for it specially when I booked.
And sitting there waiting for us, in a straw hat with a fake sunflower on it, was June Kessler.
Walt was next to her, with his white mustache and a fruity drink with a little umbrella in it.
I screamed. I couldn’t help it. Half the dining room turned around.
“Surprise,” Lynn said from behind me. She had arranged the whole thing. Of course she had.
June stood up, walked right past me, and grabbed Greg’s face in both of her hands.
“So you’re the idiot,” she said.
Greg blinked at her. “Yes, ma’am. I’m the idiot.”
“Well.” She looked him up and down. Then she pulled him into a hug. “You’re a handsome idiot. I’ll give you that.”
We ate dinner together. Walt told three of his seven fishing stories. Greg told the one about getting stuck in the chimney. June laughed so hard that she snorted, and then she blamed it on Walt.
Halfway through dessert, the piano player started playing an old Frank Sinatra song. One of the slow ones.
Greg put down his fork.
“Claire,” he said. “Would you dance with me?”
I looked at the cane leaning against his chair.
“Are you sure?”
“No,” he said. “I might fall down. I might step on your feet. I might forget which foot goes where. But I’d like to try anyway.”
So we danced.
It wasn’t graceful. His feet didn’t always go where he wanted them to. His hand shook against my back. Twice, I had to hold him up. But we stayed out there on that little dance floor in the middle of the ocean through the whole song, swaying back and forth, holding on to each other.
When the song ended, he didn’t let go.
“I have something for you,” he said.
He reached into his jacket pocket. It took him a few tries. His fingers kept missing.
I knew that gesture. I had seen it once before at that very same table, one year ago, on the worst and best night of my life. A man reaching into his pocket. The moment everything changed.
He pulled out a folded piece of paper.
He opened it with shaking hands. It was covered in handwriting. His handwriting. Crooked and wobbly and slanting in every direction, with words crossed out and rewritten. It must have taken him days to write it.
“I wanted to say this while I still can,” he said. “While I can still remember all the words.”
He cleared his throat.
“Claire. I promised you twenty-three years ago, in a church with a leaky roof, that I’d love you in sickness and in health. Then I got sick, and I forgot that the promise was yours too. I tried to take it away from you. I’m sorry. I’ll be sorry for the rest of my life. However long that is.”
My eyes were filling up. Behind us, June was already crying into her napkin.
“I can’t promise you I’ll always remember your name,” Greg read. “I can’t promise you I’ll always be kind. I can’t promise you I’ll always be able to hold your hand. But I can promise you this. Every day that I’m still me, I’m going to spend it loving you. And on the days that I’m not me anymore, I hope you’ll remember tonight. I hope you’ll remember that I knew exactly who you were. And I chose you. I would choose you every single time.”
He folded the paper back up and put it in my hand.
“Will you grow old with me?” he asked. “Whatever that looks like?”
A year earlier, in our kitchen, he had told me we weren’t meant to grow old together.
He was wrong. We just didn’t know yet what growing old together was going to mean.
It doesn’t mean rocking chairs on a porch and walking hand in hand on the beach at eighty. Maybe it never will. It means plastic cups and support groups. It means shaky signatures and dropped car keys. It means a man reaching into his pocket three times before his fingers can find what they’re looking for.
It means staying.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, you stupid, wonderful man. Every single day.”
And there, on a dance floor in the middle of the ocean, with an old woman from Oregon crying into her napkin and my sister taking pictures on her phone, I kissed my husband.
Love isn’t proof that nothing bad will ever happen to you.
Love is what you do when it does.
THE END.!
