“I thought so.” Maria's mouth does something that is not quite a smile. “He talked about you for twenty minutes. He did not need to talk about you for twenty minutes. He was buying rings. He could have selected them in eight. He simply wanted to talk about you, and I had no other customers, so I let him.”
I do not know what to do with my face. I am, perhaps for the first time in my adult life, fully and completely seen by a stranger, through the eyes of the man I love, on the basis of a twenty-minute conversation that took place in this shop months ago.
“Now, why don’t you tell me about him,” Maria says.
So I tell her.
I tell her about him. I tell her that he is enormous and warm and that he wears dinosaur scrubs and that he puts stickers on children. I tell her that I have studied the preparation of chai through seventeen distinct methods, that I keep a notebook on the subject, that I am, by any objective measure, the more qualified chai-maker in the household, and that none of this matters because he learned the technique from my grandmother over video call in a single afternoon and produces a cup that is incrementally but unmistakably better than mine. I tell her that he watches me make it anyway, every morning, with the patient amusement of someone who knows he is being out-competed and is choosing to be gracious about it. I tell her that he cannot fold a towel to save his life and that his dog chose me over him and hepretends not to be jealous. I tell her that he held my hand in a palace in India and danced with me at a festival and drove back from a hotel in Jaipur when I thought I had lost him.
I tell her more than she needs to know. She listens to all of it.
She shows me a ring. Simple. A brushed platinum band with a single, thin line of gold running through the centre, like a vein of warmth through cool metal. It is not flashy. It is not ornate. It is not anything my mother would choose, which is precisely the point.
“That one,” I say.
“You're sure? You don't want to look at the others?”
“I'm sure.”
She sizes it. She boxes it. I pay with hands that are steady, because my hands are always steady when they are doing something that matters, and this matters more than any surgery, more than any incision, more than any twelve-hour microscopic navigation of a child's brain.
The ring sits in my jacket pocket for eleven days.
I carry it to the hospital. I carry it home. I carry it to Huntsville on the monthly weekend visit, where it sits in my jacket while Brenda feeds me pie on the dock and Oliver rolls in something unidentifiable in the backyard and Casey throws the tennis ball into the lake by accident and has to wade in to retrieve it while I watch from the porch with a book and a level of amusement that I do not adequately conceal.
Brenda knows. Of course Brenda knows. Brenda Welling has the same preternatural maternal radar as my grandmother, the same ability to look at a person and read the thing they are carrying before they have decided to put it down. She does not ask. She does not press. She simply, on the Saturday evening, while Casey is showering and I am helping her wash dishes in the kitchen overlooking the lake, puts her hand over mine on the counter and says, “Whenever you're ready, sweetheart.”
I stare at her. She smiles. She hands me a dish towel.
Brenda Welling, who does not know about the ring in myjacket and somehow knows about the ring in my jacket, goes back to washing dishes, and the loons call across the lake, and the evening light is gold on the water, and I dry the dishes and I think about timing.
Timing is everything in surgery. The right incision at the wrong moment is worse than the wrong incision at the right moment, because surgery is not just precision, it is rhythm, and the rhythm is what separates the competent from the exceptional. I have spent my career mastering rhythm. I know when to cut and when to wait. I know when the tissue is ready and when it needs another moment. I know how to read the silence between heartbeats and find the space where the scalpel belongs.
I do not know how to read the silence between my own heartbeats and find the space where a proposal belongs. I have been looking for the space for eleven days, and every potential moment has been either too public or too private or too ordinary or too staged, and the ring sits in my pocket growing heavier with each passing hour, and I am beginning to understand that the problem is not timing. The problem is that I am, once again, attempting to plan an operation that cannot be planned.
Daadi calls on a Tuesday evening. She calls every Tuesday. The calls are brief, efficient, and precisely calibrated to deliver maximum emotional impact in minimum time, because Daadi Nirindra does not waste words the way she does not waste cane taps.
“Have you done it yet?” she asks, without preamble.
“Done what?”
“Arjun.”
“I don't know what you're referring to.”
“You bought a ring eleven days ago from a jeweller on Queen Street. The jeweller's name is Maria. The ring is platinum with a gold inlay. You have been carrying it in your jacket pocket and you have not asked the question because you are overthinking it, which is what you do with everything, and I am tired of waiting.”
I hold the phone away from my face and stare at it. I put it back.
“How could you possibly know this?”
“Priya tracks your credit card for security purposes. She saw the charge. She called the jeweller. Maria is apparently a very forthcoming woman when presented with a compelling narrative about two doctors in love.” A pause. “Also, Brenda called me.”
“Brendacalledyou?”
“Brenda and I speak every Thursday. We have been speaking every Thursday since you returned from India. She is a remarkable woman. Her opinions on pie crust are revolutionary. She also told me you were carrying something heavy in your jacket and looking at her son the way a man looks at someone when he has made a decision but has not yet found the courage to say it out loud.”
I sit down on the edge of the bed. Oliver, who was lying on my side, lifts his head, assesses the situation, and puts his chin on my thigh.