"Thanksgiving," he said. "Thank you. Thank you, Etta." He reached out as if to take my hand, and saw my palm, and stopped, and let his own hand fall. "I'm sorry," he said, to my hand, not to me. "I'm so sorry."
That was the fourth of September. On the second of October, an email went out to the entire fifth floor and half of the fourth, with an exclamation point in the subject line and a picture attached: a close-up of a woman's left hand, with a round diamond set high on the fourth finger, resting on a man's shoulder in front of the stone arch at the Franklin Park Conservatory. And on the eighth of October, a Thursday, Dwayne Dobbins sent a calendar invitation for a celebration in the fifth-floor kitchenette at three o'clock the following afternoon. Cake and bubbly.
I stared at that invitation on my screen for a long time. I tried to think the generous thing. Maybe a ring was the way he planned to tell her: here is the worst thing about me, and here is a promise, both at once. Maybe. But I also thought — and I could not stop thinking — that a man who believes a woman will leave him once she knows the truth might very well decide to get her to say yes before she knows it. That a ring and a party and a whole floor of witnesses with their phones up make a kind of wall. That he had looked at the deadline I gave him and decided to build that wall before the date arrived.
Winona said, that morning, "You never come to anything." And I said, all right. I'll go up.
So there I was, behind the copier, with the folder against my hip, when Talia stepped forward with her plastic flute and said, "Okay, my turn, I'll be fast."
People whistled. She laughed and waved them down. Her face was pink, from the André or from happiness, and she looked young and lovely and a little nervous, the way people do who aren't used to holding a room.
"I just want to say thank you, everybody, for this, it's so sweet. And to say —" She turned to Derek. "You know I've had a hard time. With all of it. Some of you know. I don't drive on 71, I don't do bridges, I still have dreams." Some of the implementation women nodded. "And for a long time I thought I remembered something from that morning that I couldn't find. Like a woman's voice. Pulling me out. Talking to me. And I went kind of nuts trying to figure out who it was." She laughed, and so did a few people, kindly. "And my therapist finally said, Talia, sometimes the brain just makes up what it needs. And I've decided she's right. I think my brain just took Derek and turned him into a mom." That got a real laugh, a big one, and Derek laughed too, a beat late. "Sorry, babe. So I guess what I'm saying is — I don't need to trust my memory. I trust him. That's enough. To Derek."