Page 96 of Love at First

He saw Deepa come out the door, and she waved and winked at him. Despite Nora’s many stories about Deepa’s inability to keep a secret, she’d been an absolute vault about this one. Still, he figured he was about two minutes away from Nora coming outside with a tray of stuffed mushrooms and—once she caught sight of her best friend, and Will’s, to boot—a real good sense of what was about to go down.

“Will,” Gerald said, in that permanent stick-up-his-ass voice that Will had come to love. “I’ll remind you. You have spent two years getting to know Nora, and all the people and things that are important to her, and she’s done the same for you. You’ve planned all this for her because you know the right way to love each other. And you know the right way to ask her this question. Don’t forget that.”

Will nodded, swallowed down a press of emotion. “Thanks, man,” he said.

Gerald looked straight ahead, lowering his brow. “Now, now,” he cautioned. “You certainly know I don’t approve of that kind of nickname.”

And then, as was his habit, he walked away.

Exactly as he’d expected, Nora really did know, as soon as she caught sight of Dee. With her flower crown listing to the side and her arms full of way too many stuffed mushrooms for this small crowd, she gasped and nearly tripped over the long hem of her dress, her eyes bright with moisture already.

“Dee?” she said, but almost immediately her eyes went to Will, beaming a smile that he thought could’ve lit up the whole night sky.

He stepped forward and took the tray from her before she dropped it, and immediately Nora ran to Dee, hugging and exclaiming in joy, and as Will set down the tray, he figured that alone was worth the price of admission, even if she ended up hating the rest of this whole thing.

She greeted Gerald and Sally, too, her hand against her heart. “I’m so—so this is a small poetry night, I guess!”

He walked over to her, set a hand on her back. “I hope you won’t mind. I’ve been around long enough now that I, too, can use poetry night for my own purposes.”

She smiled and flushed, her hands coming up to press against her cheeks, and he caught Gerald’s eye.

Not a mistake, he thought, and Gerald gave him a nod.

“Why don’t we go ahead and sit?”

She nodded and sat beside him in the front row of chairs, clutching his hand tight, and then the evening he’d been planning for got started.

He hadn’t been lying, that night in the hospital when he’d told Marian Goodnight he’d been getting into poetry. Maybe it’d only been one poem, back then, but by now, he’d made something of a habit of it. He went to all of Marian and Emily’s monthly readings, even the ones Nora couldn’t attend, and in between those, he got Marian’s suggestions and studied them. He signed up for an email that sent him a poem first thing in the morning, and he read each one, even the weird, too-long ones that he wasn’t sure he understood. Upstairs in their apartment, on a new set of shelves he and Nora had put in together, he had a few collections of his own, sitting in a tidy row beside the framed photograph of his parents. Poems he could say from memory, some of them that he’d ended up picking for tonight.

He hadn’t been subtle about it, because that wasn’t poetry night’s style; the first one he’d ever attended had been poems about summer on an early-summer night. So he wanted every poem tonight to be about love, forever love, and before Marian—the natural first reader of the night—was even all the way through hers, Nikki Giovanni’s “You Came, Too,” Nora had leaned over to him and whispered, “You know I’m going to say yes, right?”

He’d nodded calmly, his heart hiccupping, and squeezed her hand.

They listened and laughed throughout the readings—Jonah’s annoyance not to be reading about baseball, and Kay’s accompanying good-natured heckles from the audience. Gerald’s and Sally’s stilted but charming trade-off of lines from Shakespeare; Mrs. Salas’s teary rendition of one of Will’s favorites, a James Weldon Johnson poem about beauty that never got old. Emily’s quiet but moving recitation, barely audible but deeply genuine, and Dee’s follow-up full-throated, contrasting performance.

When it was Will’s turn, finally, Nora was dabbing a tissue under her eyes and the masses were getting restless, Benny jokingly calling out for the big finish, Mr. Salas rubbing his hands together in anticipation. Will stood and thanked everyone, and then he looked at Nora and wasn’t nervous at all. He saw this one so clearly in his mind; he knew this one by heart. Eight lines, even shorter than the first poem he’d ever read for her.

“This one’s by Mary Oliver,” he said. “So I’m pretty sure Nonna would approve.”

And when he got to the very last line—“no more words now”—he dropped to his knee in front of Nora, and she whispered his favorite words,I love you, and followed up with the answer he’d been waiting all night, all his life, to get.

Yes.