20. Second Chances
Second Chances
He had the ring in a drawer since March.
I found this out at the worst possible moment, which is to say the best one, at approximately seven-forty in the evening on the fourteenth of August, on East Beach, on a blanket, with two dogs and two stainless tumblers and the sun going down behind the wharf, when he took a small box out of a canvas bag that I had watched him pack myself and that I had assumed contained more churros.
I'd like to describe the light, because that light is the reason anybody lives here.
East Beach faces southeast, so you don't get the sun going into the water — you get the whole thing sideways, the wharf black against it, the mountains behind you going pink and then orange and then a color there isn't a name for, and the water flat and the last paddleboarder out there a hundred yards off being a silhouette.
It was eighty degrees at seven-forty at night.
The Solstice Parade had been eight weeks earlier and there was still glitter in the sand at the top of the beach, which there is until about November.
Marisol had the practice keys. Tess had made us take a blanket, which I now understand means Tess knew.
Anh Trinh was covering Monday, which means Anh knew.
Rosalind Marsh had given him, I learned in October, the single piece of advice that shaped the entire evening, which was: "Don't do it somewhere she can't cry. "
The tumblers were Tess's doing. She'd had them made — one says GOOD TEETH, GOOD COMPANY and one says BETTER TOGETHER, in the same lettering Marisol uses on the bandanas — and she'd given them to us in June "for the beach," and she had been sitting on them since May.
Floss had her head on my leg. Bear had his entire body across Nate's, which is Bear's idea of a conversation.
"So I've had this since March," Nate said.
I looked at the box.
"March," I said.
"The eleventh of March. Which is four days after a dog found a person on a beach and nine days before we flew to Maryland, and I want you to have those dates because they matter.
" He was not looking at me; he was looking at the water, and his ears had gone red, which I have seen perhaps four times.
"I bought it before Hargrove. Before the offer, before the letter, before any of it.
I want to be able to say to you, once, out loud, and then never have to defend it again: this is not what I decided when I gave up the job.
This is what I'd already decided before anybody offered me anything. "
"Nate."
"I'm going to do the thing now."
"Nate—"
"Lila Bennett," said Nate Corrigan, and turned around, and got one knee under himself in the sand with a hundred pounds of Bernese mountain dog still lying across the other leg, so that what he actually achieved was less a proposal than a controlled collapse, "I have been in love with you since a boathouse and I have known it since a courtyard and I would like to—"
"Yes," I said.
"—I'd like to spend the—"
"Yes."
"I haven't finished."
"I know," I said. "Yes."
He laughed — that surprised crack of a laugh, the one I got out of him for the first time on a cliff in the fog four years ago — and he got the box open, and I did not look at the ring for the first eleven seconds because I could not see anything, and Floss stood up and shoved her entire head into the middle of it, and Bear, sensing an event, rolled over onto his back against Nate's shins and put all four legs in the air.
It is a very good ring. It was his grandmother's, reset, in Santa Barbara, by a woman on Anacapa Street four doors down from my building, which meant that for five months I had walked past my own engagement ring twice a day.
The ring in the box in a drawer since March, for the record, was also the reason for a certain amount of behavior in April and May that I had put down to a letter and a job offer, and when I worked that out, later that night, I laughed until I had to sit down on his kitchen floor.
We got married on the eleventh of April the following year, in the sunken gardens behind the courthouse, at four in the afternoon.
There were eighty-one people. Tess Okafor was my maid of honor and gave a speech that ran nine minutes and contained the phrase "and then she said she was *fine*" four times, to escalating destruction.
Marisol Vega walked me in, because my father's knees are what they are and because he asked her to, in a conversation the two of them had without telling me and which I found out about at the rehearsal and which cost me my makeup an hour before photographs.
Walt Ostrander read something. It was not a poem. It was four sentences about a building on Anacapa Street and a basement and the people who come through a door over forty years, and he got to the end of it, which I did not expect him to.
Rosalind Marsh sat in the second row next to Adele Whitcombe, who wore a hat that has its own file in the county archives.
Diane Kessler came up from Sacramento. Ray Dominguez cried at the vows and has denied it under oath.
Priya Nair flew up from Los Angeles and brought, as a wedding gift, a framed photograph of an extremely ugly dog in a sombrero.
Anh Trinh — who became my partner in January, and whose name went on the sign that spring — held the practice open till noon that day because someone had a broken bridge, which is the most Anh Trinh sentence in this book.
Mateo Alvarez, aged ten, was an usher, and took it extremely seriously, and asked me in the vestibule whether Floss was, on this particular day, on a case.
"No," I said. "She's off duty."
"She's never off duty," said Mateo Alvarez, correctly.
The dogs carried the rings. This was a mistake and everybody told us it was a mistake and we did it anyway, and I would do it again.
Floss went down that aisle like a professional, which she is, in white with a small navy bow, with Marisol walking eleven feet ahead of her holding a piece of cheese.
Bear — in a navy bow tie the size of a dinner plate — got eleven feet from the front, saw the eighty-one people, understood at last that they were all there for him, and lay down.
Simply lay down. In the aisle. With my wedding ring tied to his collar.
There was a pause of about four seconds in which a hundred people realized what had happened. Nate closed his eyes. Somewhere behind me, Adele Whitcombe said "Oh, *marvellous*" at conversational volume.
And Floss — who was already at the front, who had *completed her assignment*, who had never in eight years failed to bring something back — turned around, walked the eleven feet back down that aisle, took the ribbon on Bear's collar in her teeth, and hauled him.
She did not get him all the way. She got him about four feet, at which point Bear decided this was a game and got up on his own, and the two of them arrived at the front together with the rings and eighty-one people making a noise I have never heard in a garden before or since, and Rosalind Marsh laughing so hard that Adele Whitcombe had to hold her arm.
Good dogs find answers. Somebody put that on a cover once.
We honeymooned in Maryland, for four days, which is the strangest sentence in this book and the right one.
We had dinner on the Tuesday in a house in Silver Spring with Elena Sela and her sister, and she made a great deal of food, and she held my hand in both of hers at the door and said something to me in Spanish that I had to ask Marisol about afterward, and Marisol told me, and I am not going to write it down.
Then we came home.
The sign went up in May. It's the same iron bracket Walt commissioned in 1986 — we kept the bracket, we kept the tooth, we kept the script I would never have chosen and can no longer imagine changing — and it says:
SANTA BARBARA SMILES
BENNETT & TRINH
DENTISTRY · WELLNESS · DOGS
Marisol Vega objected to the third word for eleven days and then had it embroidered on the new scrubs.
The fountain still doesn't work. Adele Whitcombe mentions it every Tuesday.
There is a worn place on the tile under the iron table where two dogs sleep, and a chalkboard that Tess keeps, and a basement with forty years of paper in it that I now go down into about once a month, on no particular schedule, for no particular reason, and read a few charts, and come back up.
Mateo Alvarez is eleven now and has just been told he needs braces and an opinion about everything.
And on the Tuesday after we got back from Maryland, I came down the courtyard stairs at eight-forty in the morning with my hair wet and a dog at my knee, and a man with two cups was leaning against a fountain that doesn't work, and a woman of eighty-six was already at the table by the lemon tree with her coffee, and Tess was writing on the chalkboard, and Marisol was printing an appointment book she does not need.
Tess stood back and let me read it.
COFFEE · DOGS · CLEAN TEETH
MYSTERIES HAPPEN HERE
And underneath, in small letters, where you'd only see it if you sat down:
— but not today
"Don't," I said.
She did not rub it out.
THE END