“I would like to go,” I announce.
Andrew just stares at me for a moment and then cuts Aidan off. “Hold up a second.” He covers the mic part of the phone with the palm of his hand. “You want to go to Chicago?” He seems mildly surprised.
“Sure,” I say, smiling. “I think it would be fun.”
At first, he seems to be working through something in his head. Maybe he doesn’t believe me, or maybe he’s just considering the idea and all he can see is wind and snow. But then his face lights up and slowly he begins to nod. “OK,” he says, hesitates, and puts the phone back against his ear. “Aidan, let me call you back in a few, all right? Yeah. OK. Talk to you soon. Later.”
He runs his finger over the phone and hangs up. Then he looks across the room at me again. “Are you sure? I thought you’d want to stay here for a while.”
I walk into the kitchen and get a bottle of orange juice from the fridge. “No, I’m sure,” I say, taking a sip. “Sounds like it was Michelle’s idea.”
He nods once. “Yeah, Aidan said she’s been worried about you. She offered to put us up for a few days if we wanted to visit.”
I take another sip and set the bottle on the bar top. “Worried about me? Well, that’s nice of her and all, but I hope we don’t go up there and I find myself in the same situation as I’m in with Natalie here.”
Andrew shakes his head. “Nah, Michelle’s not like that.” He backtracks that comment to put more emphasis on just how true it is. “Michelle is nothing like Natalie.”
“That’s not what I meant, Andrew.”
“I know, I know,” he says, “but really, she’s all right.”
Knowing Michelle enough myself, I know he’s right.
Then that pill hits me out of nowhere, and suddenly my head feels like it’s sort of loose on my shoulders. My whole body from my toes to the center of the top of my head is tingling, and it takes me a second to straighten my vision. My hand comes down on the edge of the bar instinctively to hold myself up.
“Whoa.” I swallow and blink my eyes a few times forcefully.
Andrew looks at me curiously. “You OK?”
A smile stretches so far across my face I feel the air from the room hit my teeth. “Yeah, I’m totally fine.”
He tilts his head to one side. “Well, I haven’t seen you grin like that since I slid that ring on your finger.” He’s vaguely smiling, too, but his curiosity dominates it.
I bring my finger up into view and admire my engagement ring, which cost under one hundred bucks and probably isn’t considered an engagement ring by brides-to-be all over the country. I saw it in a little shop in Texas one day and just briefly mentioned how pretty it was:
“I love this,” I said, holding it up to the sunlight at just the right angle. “It’s simple and there’s something special about it.”
I handed it back to the woman behind the makeshift booth, and she placed it back in the glass case between us.
“What, you’re not a diamonds-are-a-girl’s-best-friend type of girl?” Andrew asked. “No wedding rock so big you have to carry your ring hand around in a wheelbarrow?”
“No way,” I said and laughed. “Nothing meaningful about a ring like that. It’s usually about the price tag.” We walked out of the jewelry shop and along the sidewalk. “You said so yourself once, remember?”
“What did I say?”
I smiled and slipped my hand into his as we came to the street corner and took a left toward the café. “Simple is sexy.” I leaned my head against his shoulder. “That day in your dad’s house when you were preachin’ about why I shouldn’t spend an hour on makeup and hair, or whatever.”
I looked up to see him smiling, lost in the memory of that day, and then he pulled me closer.
“Yeah, I did say that, didn’t I? ‘Simple is sexy.’ Well, it is.”
“It’s also beautiful,” I said.
The day after that, Andrew came home with that same ring and held it out to me. Then in proper Andrew style, he got down on one knee and old-schooled it, except a little more dramatic than how it usually goes:
“Will you, Camryn Marybeth Bennett, the most beautiful woman on the planet Earth and the mother of my baby, do me the honor of being my wife?”
“I grinned and looked at him in a suspicious, sidelong glance and replied, “Just planet Earth?”
He blinked and said, “Well, I haven’t seen the chicks from other planets yet.”
Neither of us could resist a laugh. And so we laughed together. But then he became very serious, and his mood shifting like that only made mine do the same.
“Will you marry me?” he asked.
The tears streaming down my face. The long, deep kiss I gave him, which caused us both to fall over onto the carpet, said yes a million times over.
Sure, he had asked me to marry him that day I told him I was pregnant, but on this day he did it right, and I’ll never forget it for as long as I live.
“Are you alive in there?”
Andrew waves his hand in front of my face.
I snap out of the past and wake up back in the present, high as a f**king kite from that pill. And I realize immediately how fast I need to gather my composure so he doesn’t know what’s going on.
Andrew
12
I guess the mood swings hang around even after… well, after pregnancy for a while. Camryn flip-flopped from average to frolicking in La La Land in under an hour. But she’s happy, it seems, and who am I to judge her on how she chooses to express it?