After she and Ava stick the standing rib roast in the oven and trim the asparagus and wash the spinach, Margaret checks her phone.
It says: I can’t believe how much I miss you. Will you marry me?
She laughs! Proposed to, at the age of fifty-nine, by text message! My, how the times have changed.
Probably because she is with Kelley now, floating in some kind of nostalgic bubble with him, she instantly remembers when Kelley proposed.
New York City, May 18, a year in the last millennium. Kelley was about to graduate from Columbia Business School, but Margaret had one more semester at NYU before she got her master’s in communications. They were so poor—when they had been dating for six months, Margaret gave up her room in the NYU dorms to save money and she moved in with Kelley uptown. They cooked pasta during the week and treated themselves to pizza and a movie on Friday nights and Chinese delivery on Sundays. Margaret got the occasional job doing voice-overs for WQXR, and when those checks came in, she and Kelley blew them on shows at CBGB or something fancier, like dinner at Tavern on the Green or drinks at the bar at Beekman Tower.
On May 18, however, Kelley had just gotten a job offer from Prudential Securities, a job that paid nearly six figures a year—but Margaret didn’t know this yet. On May 18, Margaret was at jury duty, a fate worse than death, because that week in May was absurdly, unseasonably hot, and the air-conditioning in the courthouse was on the blink, and Margaret didn’t have time for jury duty! She had papers and exams, and she was trying to get an internship at the local CBS affiliate.
On May 18, Margaret emerged from the courthouse sweating and irate and dreading the interminable subway ride from the bottom of Manhattan to the top.
There was a man dressed in a black suit and white shirt on the steps of the courthouse, holding a placard with her name on it: Margaret Pryor.
Margaret was confused. He looked like one of the chauffeurs who pick up fancy people at the airport.
Margaret said, “Are you looking for me?”
“Yes, miss,” he said. “Follow me.”
Margaret didn’t want to follow a strange man. For all she knew, this was an abduction. Margaret had a friend at NYU, Leo, who was somehow related to John Gotti.
Mob, Margaret thought. Or possibly something worse? Possibly one or both of her parents had died, and her wealthy aunt Susan had sent this driver?
She tentatively followed the man in the black suit to a white stretch limousine waiting on the street.
Mob.
The back door opened from the inside, and Margaret felt a luscious blast of real air-conditioning.
She poked her head in and gasped. Kelley sat in the back, wearing his ripped khaki shorts and a Meat Loaf T-shirt. He had a bottle of champagne on ice and a dozen roses wrapped in cellophane.
“I got the job!” he said.
Margaret climbed into the limousine, kissed Kelley, and congratulated him profusely. Then she began sucking on an ice cube.
“I can’t believe you got a limo!” she said.
Kelley popped the champagne. “I only got it to drive us home,” he said. “So we’d better drink this fast.”
But as it turned out, they had one stop to make before they reached their squalid apartment uptown. The driver pulled up in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was where Margaret and Kelley had first met.
“Oh,” Margaret said. She didn’t want to be a spoilsport, but she wasn’t in the mood for the Miró exhibit or the Temple of Dendur.
Kelley pulled a box out of the pocket of his disintegrating shorts and presented her with a small but sparkling diamond.
“Marry me,” Kelley said. “Please, please, Margaret, marry me.”
Margaret smiles at the memory. Their kids call it the Quarter-Pounder Proposal, because it’s heavy on the cheese. Proposed to in a white stretch limo by a guy wearing a Meat Loaf T-shirt, offering roses he bought at the Korean deli? But what Margaret has never been able to explain to their kids is how sweet and earnest Kelley was on that day. She and Kelley were young, they were poor—but with their prospects improving—and they were in love. The air-conditioning had felt so delicious, the ice on her tongue, divine.
Kelley could teach Drake a thing or two, Margaret thinks.