Chapter 19
Perhaps it would come as a surprise to learn that even after the incident on their second date, Will and Rachel had continued to frequent that deli. There was no denying the sandwiches were on point, and they had multiple veggie options, which wasn’t always easy to come by, particularly back in the early 2010s.
The two of them just avoided the coleslaw like it was the Grim Reaper himself.
So by a little after 1:00 p.m., not only were they at the Matthaei Botanical Gardens, sitting on a plaid blanket in the same open grassy area where they’d had their picnic the first time, they were also eating food from the same place. He’d ordered the turkey (but no roast beef) for old time’s sake, and she went with a portabella-mushroom-based creation.
“To us,” Rachel said, raising her travel wine tumbler filled with sparkling grape juice, which Will met with his own. They’d debated whether to stop and pick those up because they didn’t know the gardens’ policy on alcohol and didn’t want to have to explain themselves if they appeared to be running afoul of it. Then again, after having to flee the Marquise on foot, what was a little mix-up over their beverages?
Fake wine it was.
The weather had stayed cloudy, something Will actually welcomed. Rachel loved to be out in the sun, but ever since that summer at Cedar Point, he had come to appreciate overcast days because you weren’t so reliant on a breeze to keep comfortable. The weather had warmed back up now that they had driven four hours south, and the sun beating down directly overhead would have been baking them on that blanket. The clouds may have also explained why there weren’t that many other people there, although that could’ve been because it was a Tuesday afternoon too. Either way, they had the area around the herb knot garden almost to themselves.
“So I have a confession to make,” Rachel said as she went to pour them more grape juice. He weighed that phrase as an option for revealing what he’d soon need to tell her. As long as you had no reason to worry that it was going to be followed by something like “I’m boning my tennis instructor” or “I bet six months’ rent on the outcome of the NBA All-Star Game,” it wasn’t bad.
“I ... um ... never finished the alphabet,” she admitted, her voice barely audible.
Will heard her loud and clear but was already enjoying this way too much. “I’m sorry—what was that?”
“I never got the z.”
He put his sandwich down to make sure he was free to gesture with both hands like a lawyer working a jury box.
“Well, I for one am shocked—shocked, I say!” He was having a hard time keeping a straight face while trying to prosecute her over the integrity of a road trip game, and her laughter wasn’t helping. “What a thing for the mother of my child to admit. And at the site of our second date, no less. A place, I would like the record to show, I was promised myriad sexual delights”—Rachel shushed him and swatted at his hands—“if just such a scenario arose.”
“About that. That’s not why I’m telling you. Because it’s obviously not happening.”
“Oh, I know,” he said, returning to his normal persona. “And not just because me pushing for it would take this story to a really dark and possibly criminal place. I frankly don’t think I have the sexual acumen to pull off doing it on a nature trail.”
“I also saw on the sign a disclaimer about both ticks and rattlesnakes.”
Will took a bite of his sandwich and looked out at the woods beyond them.
“Yeah, so maybe we just hit the indoor exhibits,” he said after he’d swallowed.
“Maybe,” she said, laughing again. “But the reason I’m bringing it up is because there’s no way I can go through with making you get the tattoo. I mean, I wouldn’t really have made you if you didn’t want to, anyway, but I at least could’ve roasted you relentlessly about backing out.”
“Well, I appreciate your honesty, however delayed it may have been,” he said, briefly reassuming the affect of comically aggrieved guy. But hearing himself say those words, the joke quickly gave way to something else.
There, in that place, surrounded by the memories of what had started them on the path to the life they’d built together, Will was struck on a fundamental level by how much he had to lose if his emails to Beatriz didn’t just fail in getting Rachel to go on the interview, if they didn’t simply make her mad. What if it harmed their marriage permanently? What if she didn’t feel like she could trust him the same way anymore?
What if it was this, and not some boring job, that would start to unravel everything?
Half of him wanted a way out of what he’d done as desperately as the other half was fighting to make it happen.
They finished their sandwiches and sat there amid a different kind of quiet from what they’d experienced on the shore of the lake, the lapping of the waves replaced by the calls and buzzes of birds and bugs. There was no way of undoing his lie without making a complete mess of things. Will knew that. And he still wasn’t even convinced he wanted to, the potential of it giving Rachel everything she’d ever wanted too seductive to turn away from.
But he did know the idea of that tattoo suddenly felt like more than a bet to entertain themselves on a long car ride. It felt important, a way of physically cementing their bond with whatever she had envisioned—which he knew, when it actually came time to do it, wouldn’t have been something goofy.
Rachel scooped up the wrappers from their sandwiches and went to throw them out while he topped off their cups with what was left of the grape juice and put the bottle back in the bag. As he watched her walking back, they smiled at each other.
“Did you know what you would’ve had me get?” he asked her when she’d sat back down on the blanket. “For the tattoo?”
“You didn’t like the binary code idea?”
“C’mon. For real. What would you have picked? Or did you not know?”
Rachel looked at him for a few seconds and then out at a colorful kinetic wind sculpture near the garden. “No, I knew,” she said, taking a sip of her drink.
“So what was it?”
“It was a date. 2-19-12.”
He mouthed the words back to her. “For February nineteenth, 2012?”
“Yup.”
“What was February nineteenth, 2012? I mean, I know it was our senior year.” She nodded. “Was that around the time of your grandma?” Rachel had been very close to her mom’s mom, so much so that even more than a decade later, Will thought saying “When your grandma died” would come across more sobering than he intended.
“Two days after, yeah,” Rachel said. “A Thursday. She passed on the Tuesday, I was driving home Thursday afternoon, and the funeral was Friday.”
“I remember we had lunch before you left, and I felt like such a jackass because I wasn’t going with you.”
“I know. You’ll recall you had an exam the next day, and you wanted to skip it, and I told you that you were crazy and prohibited you from coming.”
“Rings a bell,” he said sheepishly.
“Anyway, we ate, I left, and you went to your next class. Or you were going to until I called you like ten minutes later, crying, and told you I just really needed to hear your voice again. I regretted it almost instantly.”
Will startled back, wounded, like it was him who’d gotten stung by a botanical garden bee this time.
“Not because I didn’t want to hear your voice,” Rachel quickly clarified, “and not because of anything you said. I was just embarrassed to be so clearly falling apart, especially when you had other stuff to do. So I said I was being stupid and tried to get off the phone. But you said, ‘Just talk to me until you pass the next exit,’ and I said okay. Then you started telling me about this debate you and Ali were having over which Chipotle location was the best, and by the end, I was laughing so hard because they were all the same, but—”
“Uh, they were so not the same. The tortilla chips at that one by our apartment were consistently ten to twenty percent too salty. He said he liked that, which was patently absurd.”
“My point,” Rachel said, making it clear that the tortilla chips weren’t it, “is that I’d gone by like three exits by the time you were done telling me that story. Not to mention I wasn’t crying anymore. I thanked you and told you that you should go to class, but you said you’d rather talk to me. You said the same thing two hours later when you should’ve been getting ready to go to your intramural basketball game, forty-five minutes after that when it was tipping off, and then again when Ali asked if you wanted to go to the movies.”
She took another drink, but it was clear she wasn’t done. She also began twisting that strand of hair, so he knew whatever she was about to say would be highly personal.
“You stayed on the phone with me for that whole drive, Will. All five hours of it. I tried to wrap things up like half a dozen times, and each time, I was secretly hoping you wouldn’t take the bait. And you never did. Even though we saw each other all the time and talked all the time, so what else could we possibly have to talk about? But it didn’t matter. You just wanted to be with me.
“When I pulled into my parents’ driveway, you made me promise to call again if I needed anything, and then we said our goodbyes and finally hung up. And I’ll never forget sitting there for a minute in my hand-me-down Honda Accord, dreading what the next few days had in store, but feeling this peace over what was waiting for me on the other side of it.”
Rachel took a deep breath to keep herself from choking up too much to get it out.
“Because that was the day I knew I was going to marry you. February nineteenth, 2012. And I wanted this tattoo to always be there to remind you that it’s not just you. I have Will goggles too.”
Will couldn’t believe his ears.
He knew that Rachel loved him—and didn’t just love him, but loved him so deeply that it made him want to believe in soulmates. Hell, he’d just tried to argue for their existence on the drive. But that was him. He was the wear-your-heart-on-your-sleeve romantic. Not only that, but back when he and Rachel had that phone call, he had already been busy worrying about what was going to happen to them once they graduated a few months later. He’d known he was all in, but he’d been scared he was fated to fade into her personal history as the college boyfriend and nothing more. That Build-A-Bear monstrosity wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
So to learn that Rachel had known then that she wanted to marry him, and known it so definitively that she could remember the precise date when she first thought it?
“That’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever said to me,” he said, now determined to ensure this story would never be far from their minds, even if things got bad. “I think I have to get it now. Like, I want to.”
She smiled softly, and he could tell that was the reaction she’d been hoping for.
“You know,” she said, sniffing and composing herself, “I could’ve made that whole thing up just to trick you into getting it even though I didn’t finish the alphabet. Like a reverse psychology thing.”
“Hmm, I don’t think so. You’ve got a tell.”
“Was I doing the hair-twisting thing again?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Damn. Well, you caught me. Even us coldhearted pragmatists have a soft side, I guess.”
“Plus, the tattoo was technically my idea to begin with. I was planning to do it even before we made the bet. I just hadn’t had a chance to come up with what it would say. But now I have that, and since you lost the bet, I get to decide where it goes too.”
“And?”
“I’m thinking the inside of my right wrist. That way I can see it whenever I want, but I can still cover it with a long-sleeved shirt.”
“That does seem more practical than a butt cheek.”
They finished their drinks, tossed the tumblers in the bag, and stood up. Will folded their blanket while Rachel checked out the map that they had grabbed on their way in of the long narrow greenhouse-type structure known as the conservatory. It was a short walk from where they’d been sitting, and even without the sun, the rising afternoon humidity made it an attractive option for reasons that had nothing to do with snakes.
After taking a slight detour to look at the large mosaic panels adorning one of the conservatory’s exterior walls, they headed inside. Admission was, gloriously, still free, and the building was broken up into three climates: the tropical house, the temperate house, and the desert house. You entered at tropical, which was fitting for the two of them because it meant they came to the orchid display almost right away.
They stood there looking at them for a minute while a brother and sister, somewhere between the ages of five and ten, raced by, trying to hide the fact they were playing tag from their mom, who was hidden behind the pineapple plants and halfheartedly imploring them to slow down. Will imagined Rachel and himself bringing their kid here someday, and the child running around and not paying attention while Will tried to tell the story of that second date, Rachel lovingly rolling her eyes at him. Through that lens, being a parent seemed like it could be ... natural, hopeful, full of possibility.
“You really were into me,” Rachel said, slipping her hand into Will’s and breathing in deeply to soak in the freshness of the air. “I remember that orchid painting I did. It was not good.”
“It was ... not your best work, no,” Will said, and they both laughed. “But when you’re trying to plan a creative date on a budget, you look for inspiration wherever you can find it.”
“Yeah, it was a lot easier to overlook that you tried to kill me with that coleslaw after this.”
She laughed again, and he acted like he was going to pull his hand away, prompting her to grab it even tighter.
“Whatever,” he said, smiling at the familiar shape of the way they flirted with each other.
They meandered their way deeper into the tropical house, following one of the semicircular branches off the main path and stopping to admire the coffee plants. As they went, they got closer to a small indoor waterfall that set the entire scene against a soothing backdrop of white noise.
“It’s so peaceful,” Rachel said. “Maybe we should get a noise machine for the baby’s room.”
“Forget the baby. I feel like I could fall asleep standing up right now.”
In the temperate house, they passed a fragrant olive tree and followed the center aisle all the way to the koi pond and then doubled back on one of the side paths, past the black bamboo and the bonsai display. There in front of them was a wooden bench set back off the path, against a date palm tree.
“Do you remember what I said to you about that bench when we were here the last time?” Will asked.
“You told me you’d read online that sitting under that tree while you were on a date was supposed to be good luck.”
“God, I was so smooth,” he said with a self-deprecating laugh. “How long did it take you to figure out I was completely full of it?”
“Oh, I’d say almost instantly,” she said. “I’m skeptical of most things involving puns.”
“So why’d you sit with me?” he asked, taking a seat on the bench. She took the spot next to him.
“You were trying so hard, especially after everything that happened with the picnic,” Rachel said. “It was very sweet, and I found it incredibly genuine—even though, ironically, you were lying.”
The way she told it—it made him feel so warm and comfortable. Understood. Safe. Like of course she’d get why he’d emailed Beatriz. It was Will, and this was a very Will thing to do.
So was this the moment? Should he say something like Speaking of being genuine while lying and just go for it and tell her? This bench had worked once before. So had the one at the art institute when he’d proposed. Maybe benches had a weird cosmic significance for their—
“Hey, let’s ask them to take a picture of us,” Rachel said, nodding toward an older couple looking at the olive tree, pulling Will’s attention back. “You know, so we have a nice one in addition to the one from the crime scene.”
Will went over to see if they’d be willing, which they of course were. He returned to Rachel and sat back down, wrapping his arm around her shoulder and pulling her close. The man took the picture while the woman stood to the side and sighed, more to herself than anyone else. “Just beautiful,” she said.
Will and Rachel thanked them and waited until the couple were at the carnivorous plant display before checking the photo, just in case they didn’t like it. Their caution, though, turned out to be unnecessary.
“Oh, that’s a keeper,” Rachel said, still studying Will’s screen. “We look good.”
“Right?”
She kissed him on the cheek, and they got up from the bench and headed in the direction of the desert house. He was still trying to gather himself to say what he needed to and decided he’d send the picture to his mom as one final confidence boost.
Back in Ann Arbor where it all started, he typed as a caption and then sent. He’d instinctively slowed down with his eyes on his phone, and when he looked up, he realized Rachel had disappeared into the new climate ahead of him.
It was the smallest of the three—and surprisingly, not really any hotter. It was also quiet, even more so than the tropical and temperate houses. If he hadn’t known Rachel had gone in ahead of him, he would’ve assumed he was alone among the cacti.
“Babe?” he ventured while peering down at something called living rocks.
“Over here,” she called back. She sounded like she was up a path that arced through the center of the room.
Will followed her voice. Before he turned the corner, his phone vibrated in his hand.
“My mom says we’re a perfect ...,” he started. “Whoa, what’s this?”
Rachel was down on one knee next to a short stone wall.
“Will Easterly,” she said, unable (or uninterested) in keeping the huge grin off her face.
“Yes?”
“Will you make out with me for a minute in front of this giant cactus that looks like a mushroom from Super Mario Brothers?”
He laughed and walked to her, offering her his hands as she stood.
“Well, this certainly didn’t happen the last time we came here,” he said.
“What can I say? All these years, I guess your love of the unexpected romantic gesture has rubbed off on me.”
The window of opportunity hadn’t closed. He could still tell her now.
But just as surely as he knew that, he knew it would be more romantic to do it right after he got 2-19-12 inked on the inside of his wrist.
Get the tattoo, and then he’d put it all on the line.
And besides, before he could say another word, Rachel brought her mouth to his, and they kissed like they hadn’t already done so a thousand times before.