He looked over at Lily on the floor in her jingling horse sweater.
“Lily?” he said. “Do you want to ask her too? Like we practiced?”
Lily jumped up. She ran over and stood next to her dad. She took a deep breath.
“Claire,” she said very seriously. “Will you marry us?”
I couldn’t speak.
I looked at the two of them, Ethan on one knee and Lily standing beside him in her purple horse sweater with jingle bells on the antlers. Both of them had the same brown eyes and the same dimple on the left side. Both were waiting.
I knelt down on the rug in front of them.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes. Both of you. Yes.”
Lily screamed. She threw her arms around my neck so hard she knocked me over backward onto the rug. Ethan fell on top of both of us, laughing and crying. The jingle bells on Lily’s antlers went crazy.
Dad took about four hundred pictures.
Jenna was screaming. Mike was clapping. Mike’s mother was crying into a napkin.
And somewhere underneath all of it, lying on my back on my father’s living room rug with my soon-to-be husband and my soon-to-be daughter piled on top of me, I started laughing. I couldn’t stop.
We got married in March.
At City Hall, on a Tuesday, exactly the way I’d always said I wanted. Dad walked me in. Jenna and Sarah were my witnesses. Lily was the flower girl. She’d been practicing for Jenna’s wedding anyway, so she was ready. She threw rose petals all over the clerk’s office floor, and the clerk didn’t even mind.
Lily wore her yellow dress. She insisted. “Mommy would want yellow,” she said.
I wore a simple white dress I bought at a department store. Ethan wore his good suit.
