Epilogue
Jasmine
Eight months later, I live in a city I'd never set foot in, in an apartment with a man who unplugs the refrigerator every night before bed and swears, lying, that he can't sleep through the hum either.
I let him have the lie. I've learned that's a thing you do for people you love.
You let them be quietly good to you, and you don't turn it into a discussion.
There's a whole matching set of plates in the cabinet now, because a hockey player who once owned exactly one of them went a little feral with a registry scanner the week I moved in.
And there's a note on the refrigerator door in his blocky handwriting, gone soft at the corners with age, the one that says: in case you ever just need a place that's quiet.
I never took it down. It reminds me that, now, Caleb is my quiet place.
I bought a one-way ticket here. That's the part I'm proudest of in my entire life.
Not Caleb, not my father, not the job, not the speeches.
Me. The woman who never once did a reckless thing on purpose sat down at her color-coded spreadsheet, looked at the column marked REASONS NOT TO, which was long, which was still correct, and bought a one-way ticket to North Carolina anyway, because the other column still held only one thing and the one thing still won.
Him.
He cried at the airport, although he'll deny it. I have it documented, though. I am, after all, very good at documentation.
I took a job my second month here, running compliance for the athletic department at a small college across town.
It’s different working for a boss other than my father, but it’s a good program and a busy one, full of kids who need somebody keeping their eligibility clean and their files honest. It turns out the work I did from the shadows of my father's building for three years is work other places will hire you to do and thank you for to your face.
I am still adjusting to the part where they thank me.
“You're doing the thing,” he calls from the kitchen.
“What thing, Adams?”
“The middle-distance thing. The feelings-spreadsheet thing.” He sets a bowl down in front of me, and yes, there are two, and I have decided to stop being embarrassed about that, the same way I've stopped being embarrassed about most of what I am. “Talk or eat.”
“You’re too good to me. One day I’m going to cook you the one thing I know how to.”
“No rush, baby. I’m happy to cook. Now stop stalling and tell me what you were over there thinking about.”
“I was thinking that I'm happy,” I say, because we still have a rule about the truth. “And that I finally know how to hold it, settle in it, even wallow in it.”
He goes still for a second, then leans down and kisses the top of my head. “That’s good, baby. It took you long enough.”
“I gave the preseason eligibility briefing at work last week. Forty athletes in a locker room, and I stood at the front and delivered the whole rulebook to their faces. I made eye contact with three of them on purpose and survived it.”
“Look at you.” He says it like I lifted a trophy. “My badass girl.”
For three years, I gave that same talk for my father from a chair along the boards that nobody ever turned to look at. Last week I gave it from the front of the room and let every one of them see who was doing the talking.
“I'm not a badass.”
“What? Do I need to remind you that you took a microphone in front of two thousand people and saved my ass from a folding table?”
“That was one time.”
“It was the best time. I think about it daily.”
We talk now, my father and I. Not perfectly.
He's a hard man who spent a long time getting it wrong, and he’s not going to learn a new language in under a year.
But he learned my coffee order. He flew out for my birthday and sat through a dinner that was hard for him because Caleb can sometimes be overly affectionate in public now that we can be.
He calls every Sunday, which is nice. But he still can't say I love you, because that word got buried so deep in him decades ago, I don't know if he'll ever dig it back out.
Last month, he ended a call with “ Be good to yourself, kiddo,” which, from my father, is basically I love you.
Afterwards, I sat in a grocery store parking lot and cried about it for ten minutes, and Caleb didn't ask why.
He just drove us home and made the soup I like, with sourdough toast on the side.
In three days, Caleb's whole family lands at the airport, but I'm so nervous, I don’t exactly know what to do with those feelings.
I've talked to Christian on the phone a hundred times by now.
He calls almost as often as my father does, which is to say Caleb's family adopted me somewhere around month two or three without anybody taking a vote. But I’ve never been in a room with all of them at once, and a room with all of them feels… like a big fucking deal.
“You don't have to do the whole airport,” Caleb told me last night, careful, leaving me the room he always leaves me. “I can grab them, bring them back slowly. You meet them here, where you’re comfortable. Nobody's going to think anything of it.”
“I'm coming to the airport,” I said.
“Jasmine.”
“I made a card.” I showed him. I'd written each of their names and one thing about each of them, pulled from eight months of phone calls, so I'd have something to anchor to if my brain went blank at the gate.
Bean: ten, wants to be a marine biologist this month, hates being called the baby.
Courtney: fourteen, honor roll, secretly the softest.
Christian: nineteen, notices everything, like his brother, carries the whole house on his back and pretends it weighs nothing.
“I did my homework. I'm not going to freeze on your family.”
He looked at the card for a long time. Then he looked at me like I'd done something incredible, which, for me, walking into an airport full of strangers on purpose to meet the family of the man I love, is kind of incredible.
“They're going to love you,” he said. “You know that, right?”
“I'm counting on it.”
Here's the other thing. For about three weeks now, Caleb has been almost saying something.
He'll go quiet, and his jaw will do a thing, and then he'll change the subject and go cook.
Last week, I caught him on the phone with my father, of all people, talking low, and when I walked in, he hung up too fast and said he was checking on the Ice Mafia freshman.
I ran several scenarios in my head, the way I run everything. There is only one thing it adds up to.
I haven't told him I know. For once in my life, I don't want to see the ending coming. This is the one I want to be standing in the middle of when it happens, all the way present, no list, the way he taught me on a mattress on the floor of his apartment a year ago.
I want to be surprised. I’ve decided to let myself be surprised. It might be the most reckless thing I have ever chosen on purpose, but from what everyone else says, surprises can be good.
He does it the night before his family comes.
Not with them there, which is what I'd braced for. He does it quietly. Just us. Two bowls of buttered popcorn, my show paused on the screen, and he turns to me on the couch and opens his hand.
In it is a bent paper clip.
The bent paper clip. Mine. The one from the conference room, the one he picked up off a table a year and a half ago and kept, the one I left on the boards at six in the morning and was secretly sad about for a week. He kept it. Of course, he kept it. He keeps the stuff that matters.
“I had a whole speech,” he says, and his voice isn't steady, which is how I know this is real and not performed.
“I practiced it on your dad, which was horrible, thanks for asking.
And then I figured, you've never once needed me to perform for you. So.” He turns the paper clip in his fingers, out and back, slow, the thing we do, the thing that means I see you, come back, stay.
“I'm not good at quiet. Ask anybody. But you made a space quiet enough for me to hear myself think for the first time in my life, and I'd like to spend the rest of it being in that space with you.
I'm asking you to marry me, Jasmine. With a paper clip, because the ring is in my other pocket, and I wanted to do this part first. This part is only ours.”
I do not freeze.
That's how I know I'm a different person than the one he met a year ago. The biggest moment of my life, the brightest, most overwhelming thing that has ever happened to me, and I don’t lose my shit. I stay. I'm here. I'm all the way here for it.
I’m happy.
“Yes,” I say immediately, because what else would I say to the man of dreams? It’s the fastest I’ve ever said anything in my life. “Yes. Obviously yes!”
He smiles then laughs, and gets the actual ring out of the other pocket, and his hands are shaking worse than mine, and he tells me before he does it, the way he tells me everything, “I'm going to put this on you now,” and he does, and it fits, because Caleb is the kind of boyfriend who finds out your ring size by tracing one of your other rings onto a napkin while you sleep and then makes your father double-check the number.
“You practiced your speech on my dad?” I say. “When?”
“I couldn’t get away from camp to talk to him in person, but I called him.
We had a video chat, man to man.” He pulls me into his chest. “I asked his permission to marry you, and he said yes before I even finished the sentence. Then I practiced the speech. Made him tear up, although we’ll both be denying it forever. ”
“This ring is pretty.”
“You like it?”
“I love it, Caleb.”
“And you’re sure?”
“Have I ever said yes to anything I wasn’t sure about?”
“Then come over here, Mrs. Adams, and let’s consummate this new arrangement,” he grins devilishly.
I know that look.
And I know what follows is going to be just as delicious as this dinner he’s cooked.
***
Caleb’s family lands the next afternoon, and I meet them at the gate with my note card in my pocket, and I never get to use it, because Bean spots Caleb from forty feet out and screams and runs, and then there are arms everywhere and noise, so much noise.
It’s the kind of thing I built my whole life to stay clear of, and I stand in the middle of it with a ring on my hand, not wanting to leave. That's the miracle of it. I'm in Adams family noise, and I’m not counting the exits. This is my noise now.
Christian hangs back half a step, the way the ones who notice everything do.
He finds me over the chaos, and he doesn't hug me right off; he just looks, and then he says, “It’s nice to finally meet you.” He grins exactly like his brother and says, “He called me from a parking lot eight months ago, and all he talked about was you, and now you’re here. ”
And then he hugs me, and over his shoulder, Caleb has a sister hanging off each arm, watching his brother hug the woman he's going to marry, and his face is doing the thing my father's face did the night I took that microphone. He barely breathes, and I make sure I give him a look that lets him know…I’m okay.
I think this is a family. I have a family. The loud kind. The kind that stays. And I think I like it.
My phone buzzes in the airport. It’s my father. He sends me a photo of a kid in a Valencia City jersey, glowering at the camera like it owes him money. Under the picture, there are five words in the chat.
Dad: New transfer. Pray for me.
I laugh, and Caleb leans in to see, Bean still attached to his arm. “Who's that?”
“Dad's new project. Came in last week. He’s a doozy.” I zoom in on the kid's face, on the set of his jaw, on the way, even in a still photo, you can see the crazy in his eyes. “He's got the look.”
“What look?”
“The one you had on the first day. Like a guy who walks into every room with a chip on his shoulder and something to prove. Waiting for a fight. Hoping for one.”
Caleb's quiet for a second. “Poor kid.”
“Agreed,” I say.
Then my phone buzzes again, a second text, and I read it, and I go very still, and then I start to smile.
Dad: Assigning him to the new compliance hire. Quiet girl. Brilliant. Keeps to herself. You'd like her. She's already filed two complaints about him, and it's been four days.
“Two complaints in four days,” Caleb reads over my shoulder. “That's got to be a record.”
“It's not. I filed three on you your first week.”
“You did not.”
“I absolutely did,” I chuckle.
I put my phone away and look at the chaos of the family I'm marrying into, the brother and the two sisters, and the ring on my hand that started its life as a paper clip in spirit, and the whole impossible life I bought a one-way ticket toward.
“What?” Caleb asks, watching my face. “What's the look?”
“I’m thinking about our wedding day.”
“Ooh, I like that kind of overthinking.”
“Jasmine, do you like cinnamon rolls?” Bean asks.
“I sure do,” I tell her. “You want one? They’ve got a place in the airport that makes big ones.”
“Ooh, yeah!”
I take Caleb’s free hand, the one without a sister on it. “Let’s go buy sugar for the fam’,” I smile.
That night, after the airport, after the noise, after his family is finally asleep across every couch and stretch of floor in our too-small apartment, Caleb and I lie in the dark in each other’s arms, but I can’t sleep.
“Still planning our wedding day, baby?” he says into my hair, half asleep, knowing me. “Your mind is moving a mile a minute.”
“Happiness is hard,” I say. “It needs planning.”
I feel him smile against my temple.
“We can plan tomorrow, baby. Let’s plan tomorrow.”
Thank you for reading Jasmine and Caleb’s story.