Chapter 24: Breakfast

Abe set the tray on the floor.

Then he got down on one knee beside it, in a hotel robe, on the same carpet where my dress had been six years ago.

"I'm not doing this in a boardroom," he said. "Or on a sidewalk. Or in front of a cake."

"Good."

"Yvette Langford." He took the ring out of the cotton. "Will you marry me?"

I held the green egg in both hands.

"I have terms," I said.

"I'd be worried if you didn't."

"You make breakfast. Every morning. For the rest of your life."

"Agreed."

"You never leave a note where you should be."

His face changed.

"Agreed," he said, and his voice wasn't steady at all.

"And you teach him to drive in a church parking lot."

He closed his eyes for a second.

"Yes," he said. "In a church parking lot."

"Then yes," I said.

He put the ring on my finger.

It fit.

It meant something different now.

I called Hank's house before we'd finished the toast.

Finn answered, breathing hard.

"Did you open it?"

"I opened it."

"Technically I painted it," he said. "Dad only did the inside."

I heard Hank in the background, laughing so hard he started coughing.

We got married on a Saturday at the end of October, in my backyard in Evanston.

It was six years to the week since the hotel.

Abe's men set up forty white chairs under the oak.

Then they took off their jackets and sat in the back row.

The plumber cried first.

Abe's mother sat in the front row in blue, holding my aunt's hand.

They'd met an hour before and were already planning Thanksgiving without asking me.

My board chair came, and the woman in pearls from the fortieth floor, and the kid with the laptop in a borrowed tie.

The bank had renewed my line on Tuesday.

The chairman told me so in a whisper on his way to his seat.

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