Page 64 of Finding Home

He stood and went to his bedroom.

Beside his closet was a set of drawers his parents had given him when he went to college. The sock drawer stuck slightly in cold weather, so he jiggled it open.

Behind his plain black work socks and the SpongeBob SquarePants socks his brother had given him last Christmas, was a small, velvet box. It was worn soft at the corners from where he’d handled it over the years.

Cole carried it back to the kitchen and opened the lid.

His dad had pressed the box into his hands the winter after Cole’s grandmother had died. James had inherited her wedding band.

Cole had been thirty-one, working from Portland, and never thought he’d ask anyone to marry him. But his dad had insisted he have it. You’ll know when it’s the right person, his dad had told him.

It had taken many years before Cole thought he’d found the person he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. Vanessa was careful, thoughtful, and good. He’d bought a ring from a jeweler, and proposed at a restaurant overlooking the Eiffel Tower. He’d done everything correctly. But he’d never once taken this box out of its hiding place and held it the way he was holding it now.

The ring was small. A round stone in a plain band, worn from decades of daily life. He lifted it out of the box and placed it in the palm of his hand. His grandmother had grown vegetables, sold quilts at the local market, and raised three children with this ring on her finger.

It wasn’t a statement piece. It was the kind of ring a person put on and forgot they were wearing, because it became a part of them.

That was what he wanted to give someone.

That was what he wanted to give Julie.

He took out his phone and called his brother.

“I was thinking about you,” James said. “I know we postponed Christmas together, but when are you coming here?”

“I’ll be there in a few weeks,” Cole said. “Once I’ve booked my tickets, I’ll let you know the date.” He closed his hand around the ring. “I need to tell you something.”

“Sounds serious.”

“It is. I’m going to ask Julie to marry me.”

The silence lasted long enough to tell Cole that his brother was taking what he’d said seriously. “Cole,” James said softly. “Are you sure? You’ve only known her for three months.”

“I know.”

“That’s twelve weeks,” James said. Not harshly. Just clearly.

“I know that, too.” Cole looked at the photograph of himself and James standing on either side of their granddad. His grandfather’s head was tilted slightly to the right, and he was laughing at something that was happening or had been said beyond the camera.

Cole wondered if his dad had been telling them one of his corny jokes. “I’ve never been more sure about anything.”

James sighed. “Because three months⁠—”

“When I was in the hospital, I had a lot of time to think,” Cole told him. “I thought about what I’d been doing with my life. Every project I’d walked away from before I saw what it became. Every person I’d kept at arm’s length because there was always somewhere else I needed to be.” He paused. “I’m sixty-four years old. I’m not going to be here forever, James. I want the years I have left to mean something, and I want to spend them with someone I love.”

He stopped and took a deep breath. “Julie makes me happy. Not in some temporary way. She makes me want to be in the room she’s in. She makes me want to come home. I’ve never had that. Not once. Not even with Vanessa.”

James was quiet on the other end of the phone.

“I never took grandma’s ring out for Vanessa,” Cole said. “I never even considered it. It stayed in the drawer for four years and I never touched it.”

“And now?” James asked.

Cole opened the palm of his hand. “Now it’s been sitting in my hand, and it feels exactly right.”

“Does Julie know how you feel?” James asked.

“She knows some of it.”