The Event

by Whitney Dineen

  Ethan guides me from the car into the hotel with his left hand placed gently on my lower back. The lobby is old-world elegant, and I feel like a princess entering a castle.

  Once we’re seated, our waiter, a middle-aged man wearing black pants with a matching vest and bow tie, greets us, “Mr. Crenshaw, Ms. Masterton, we’re so honored to have you dining with us. My name is Frank, and I’ll be taking care of you this evening.” Wow, that was worth a couple hundred bucks right there. It’s the little things like this that make people keep coming back.

  Frank pops open a bottle of champagne and pours for us. Ethan has left no detail unattended. He’s even requested the same champagne Jazz and Dylan served at their wedding, Veuve Clicquot Rosé.

  After our appetizers are ordered—lobster risotto for me, and the caprese salad for him— Ethan surprises me by dropping to one knee beside me. “Catriona …” My heart starts to beat so loudly I can hear it pounding inside my ears. Before he can say anything else, I start the little camera in my brain clicking away to save this moment for posterity. I never suspected he was going to propose marriage tonight.

  I inhale deeply and look up at the mural of a blue sky with white, fluffy clouds painted on the eighteen-foot ceiling. I observe the gold-leaf crown molding and count all six crystal chandeliers. Everything seems to be moving in slow motion.

  I always thought that women who claimed they didn’t know a proposal was coming were just playing up the drama for the retelling of their story. Turns out, some might really be surprised. I finally look at Ethan and say, “Yes?”

  He smiles widely. “Will you do me the great honor of becoming my wife?”

  First of all, there’s no way I’m not going to say yes. I mean, this is storybook stuff. Secondly, I love Ethan, and thirdly, did I mention the perfection of this night? I semi-shout, “Yes! Yes, I’ll marry you!” A crowd of fellow diners give us an encouraging round of applause as the waiter approaches with a ring box on a silver tray.

  Ethan opens the lid and removes an emerald-cut diamond from its black velvet pillow. He places it on my ring finger while uttering a heartfelt, “Thank you.”

  I wish someone was recording this so I could watch it on replay. Even though I’m living it, it feels like it’s happening to someone else and I’m sure to forget some detail. Once Ethan gets back into his chair, he announces, “You should move in with me. We’ll be able to save more money for the wedding that way.”

  What he says is true. My thirty-eight hundred dollar a month apartment will add up to a hefty sum for a wedding. I ask, “When would you like me to do that?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it since I bought the ring, and decided if you said yes, you should move in right away. I know your lease is month-to-month, and as this is the last week in the month, how about over the weekend?”

  And just like that, my life as a single woman in New York City comes to an end. I’ve never lived with a man, and suddenly I feel quite grown up. I mean, sure I’m thirty, and have a successful business, but now I’m an engaged woman to boot. If you had told me last year that this would be happening, I would have never believed you.

  One Year Later

  “Catriona, would you please pass the No-Salt?” Ethan never calls me Cat.

  Despite the fact that he’s been asking for that god-awful substitute for the year we’ve lived together, I can’t help but crinkle my nose. Still, I hand over his salt replacement and ask, “Why do you insist on using that?”

  Over the top of his glasses, he explains, “Based on my heredity, there’s a thirty-eight-percent chance I will develop high blood pressure by the time I’m forty. By not using salt to season my food and by doing a minimum of thirty minutes of cardio a day, I reduce my chances to a mere twelve percent. Those are odds I can’t afford to ignore.”

  This is the kind of information Ethan is known for. It’s a bi-product of his job, and while I suppose he’s right, I’d personally rather die five years early and really enjoy my food than put up with the weird aftertaste of the fake stuff.

  If we can ever get confirmation on our preferred wedding venue, I’m fully prepared for an all-out battle about serving real salt at our reception. For me, this is a non-negotiable point.

  “Our flight to Chicago leaves at five thirty tomorrow night.” I say this as I grind some pink sea salt onto my scrambled eggs.

  “We should have a car pick us up at eleven fifteen, then.”

  I perform an internal eye roll. I don’t care how early Ethan leaves for the airport when he’s traveling alone, but I absolutely refuse to spend my life anticipating the worst and winding up sitting at JFK for three hours before getting on a plane. “I have a lunch meeting tomorrow, so I’ll have to meet you there—if you insist on going early, that is.”

  He gives me the look, one that suggests, “Aren’t we being a little frivolous?”

  I cut him off at the pass before he has a chance to say it. “I’m meeting with the Vanderhauffers, of Vanderhauffer Jewels on Fifth Avenue, about doing their daughter’s wedding. The kind of money and exposure we’re talking about will more than make up for the extra car fare.”

  I’m actually not meeting the Vanderhauffers tomorrow; I’m meeting with them today. I have a massage scheduled for tomorrow to preemptively defeat the incoming stress of Thanksgiving. I don’t usually lie to Ethan, but sometimes it’s just easier than having to explain myself. Also, it avoids a heated disagreement, which I’m against, as a rule.

  Plus, let’s be honest, there is no way Ethan will appreciate the eccentricities of my family. I firmly believe there is a widely accepted range of behavior—from straight and stodgy to certifiable—that all humans exhibit from one degree to another. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, my family is firmly lodged in the quirky range.

  Take my mother, for instance. She’s plagued by a disorder where kitchen gadgets actually talk to her and beg her to take them home. During my childhood, she would drag me from one garage sale to the next just to see what treasures people were getting rid of. God forbid it was a shortbread pan in a shape she didn’t have or some kitchen wonder that promised to peel, slice, dice, or waffle cut any vegetable you could imagine.

  She’s currently the proud owner of twenty-nine shortbread pans that form every shape from flower bouquets, to hearts, to the Loch Ness Monster. In addition, she has a basket of assorted culinary oddities, which she stores in the laundry room. She doesn’t know exactly what they do or how to assemble them. She just knows they might come in handy one day, and God forbid she not have them when they’re needed.

  Also, my mother is the only human being alive who knows how to properly load a dishwasher—knives down, forks up, and no spoon caught spooning with another, ever. Even if you follow every one of her dictates to the letter, you will still inevitably do it wrong. “Forks up only on the first twenty-two days of the month and never on a full moon!” You think I’m kidding? Don’t get me started on what happens when Mercury is in retrograde.

  My mother’s idiosyncrasies used to bug the absolute crap out of me until I decided to find them charming. Now when she tells me about a new shortbread pan she’s found or complains that after thirty-five years of marriage, my dad still doesn’t know how to load the dishwasher, I just smile. I’m never going to change her, and darn if I’m not going to miss these conversations someday.

  Then there’s my nan, who is happily still alive at eighty, and living with my parents. She developed something like Tourette syndrome when I was eight. Up until then, she was a perfectly normal grandma. Then one day, out of the blue, she snapped.

  We had all been sharing a pew at the First Presbyterian Church on Easter morning. I couldn’t wait to get home and bite the head off my solid chocolate Godiva Easter Bunny, but in the meantime was covertly popping jelly beans into my mouth, slowly sucking off the semi-hard candy coating before letting the delicious gummy center melt on my tongue.

  I’d just eaten two pink ones, two whi
te ones and had started on my two yellow, when Pastor Abernathy’s wife walked by us. Nan shouted out as loud as you please, “Twat!” You’ve never heard such silence. The entire congregation was not only rendered mute, but totally immobile by the epithet hanging in the air above them.

  Mrs. Abernathy had stopped dead in her tracks, slowly turned around, and scowled at my grandmother—a woman she’d known since they were in elementary school together. She had stared her down in such a way a lesser mortal would have succumbed to the arctic exposure of her glare.

  My grandmother, on the other hand, had merely smiled and greeted, “Dorcas, how are you this fine Sunday?” It effectively left everyone wondering if they’d really heard what they thought they heard or if they’d all been victims of some strange audio hallucination.

  The doctor hadn’t been able to pinpoint the exact cause of her change, but guessed it was the result of a series of small strokes that effectively killed the governor living in her brain. After the incident at church, Nan became proficient at saying whatever she was thinking, wherever she was thinking it. Most people decided to act like they didn’t hear her. It was a weird truce between the citizens of our little town and an old lady seemingly bent on offending everyone she came into contact with.

  If a proliferation of shortbread pans and curse words weren’t enough, my father’s quirk is a love of dead rodents. No, I’m not kidding. I only wish I were. He has other peculiarities, but this one stands out as the most glaring.

  My brother, Travis, is plagued by overt-selfishness and an inability to grow up. At twenty-nine, he’s unemployed, living in my parents’ basement, medicating his angst over life not turning out the way he expected with anything he can get his hands on—scotch, pot, Benadryl, sleeping pills. You name it, if it can alter his consciousness in any way, he’s all over it like flies on a cow pie.

  Why am I telling you all of this? Because up until this point, I’ve managed to keep Ethan from ever meeting my family. Even with us in New York City, and them in Illinois, it hasn’t been easy to keep them apart. Now that we’ve been official for over a year, and Thanksgiving is just around the corner, Ethan has decreed he will meet my family, regardless of any excuse I come up with to keep that from happening. He’s also invited his mom and dad along so that we can share our wedding plans with both sets of parents at the same time.

  I can only hope my particular quirk, which is an almost mystical belief that all things work out as they should, is less a Pollyanna-ish pipe dream and more a fact-based reality. Otherwise, there’s no way I can see this weekend going well for any of us. Is it any wonder I’ll be spending two hours with a hulking masseur? I’ll probably need another two when we get home.

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