Mack reached across the table and took her hand. “I got a job offer today,” he said. “And if you agree to come with me, I’m going to take it.”
“What kind of offer?” she said.
“Working for How-Baby,” Mack said. “For the Texas Rangers. Setting up hotel rooms, restaurants, flights. It would mean traveling around the States. It would mean the winters off. It would mean more money.”
Maribel went to the sink, ripped a paper towel off the roll and blew her nose. “How-Baby,” she said. “I always liked that man.”
“He and Tonya want to see you,” Mack said. “They can hardly wait. And How-Baby said he would triple my salary, Maribel. Triple it.”
“What are you going to do about the farm?” Maribel asked.
Mack thought about that for a minute. He still didn’t know what to do about the farm. “We’ll figure it out,” he said. “Maybe I’ll wait a year to see how I like this job. I’ll have Pringle hire someone for one harvest, and if the job works out, maybe I’ll sell the farm. The thing is, we’ll be able to do it, you and me, I know we will.”
“You’ll have to do it alone,” Maribel said, bunching the paper towel in her hand. “I’m not going with you.”
“You have to come with me.”
Maribel paced the kitchen floor so that the soles of her running shoes squeaked against the linoleum. “You just don’t get it, do you?”
Mack took a deep breath. He felt as though he were falling, in a dream. “You don’t get it,” he said. “I’m asking you to marry me.”
For the first time in their relationship, he’d surprised her. Well, maybe the second time, because he knew finding out about Andrea had surprised her too. Just watching her gave Mack a rush. She was wearing a pale pink T-shirt, jean shorts, her running shoes. Her hair was in a bun held together by a pencil. At that moment, Mack wanted to be Maribel-she was getting something she’d wanted for so long.
“You’re asking me to marry you?” Maribel said.
I should sink to one knee, he thought. It seemed silly, there in the dampness of their rented apartment, but Mack made himself do it. He knelt.
“Will you marry me? Will you be my wife?” The words came right out; it was easy. He would say them over and again; he would scream them out. “Will you please marry me?”
Maribel stared over the top of his head as though his thoughts were suspended in a balloon. Answer me! the balloon would say. And then for a second it occurred to him she might say no, and that was like peeking into a dark hole with no bottom.
“Maribel, will you marry me?” Mack asked a little louder.
She looked at his face as though she were surprised to find him there, on one knee, his eyes level with her tan legs.
“Of course,” she said. “Of course I’ll marry you.”
Lacey Gardner couldn’t believe it. For twelve years she’d watched Mack grow up: She watched him run the hotel, graduate from the community college on the Cape, grieve for his parents; she watched him take girls on dates. And she watched him, especially carefully, with Maribel. But never in a million years would she have predicted this-and Lacey was old enough now to have very few things shock her. But this, yes. Mack brought her usual cup of coffee and the Boston Globe from the lobby, and before she even scanned the headlines, there was this news.
“I’ve asked Maribel to marry me and she said yes.”
His tone of voice was barely repressed joy, pride, awe, and Lacey supposed that was as it should be. Lacey experienced first surprise and next, sadness. Mack, then, lost to her forever, in a way.
“And all this time, I thought you were saving yourself for me.”
Mack hugged her across the shoulders so that she nearly spilled coffee in her lap. His energy astounded her-maybe he was in love with the girl after all. “You’re the best, Gardner. The absolute best. You’re the first person I’ve told.”
“You’ll be moving out, then?” Lacey said. She eyed the leather sofa where Mack had slept the last two weeks. Usually, he came in after she fell asleep and was up before she awoke, but for two weeks there was another human being under her roof, and that felt good. She sometimes heard Mack’s footsteps or the toilet flush in the middle of the night, and once, when she couldn’t sleep, she tiptoed out to the living room and saw his figure under the blankets and she wished he would never leave, that he would simply stay with her until she died.
“I’ll be moving back to the apartment,” he said. “But we’ll still have our Sunday night dinners. I told Maribel that was part of the deal. Sunday nights are for you, Lacey.”
“Well, good,” she said.
Mack was getting married.
Lacey remembered back to September of 1941 when she and Maximilian drove Sam Archibald’s dune buggy out to Madaket. Sam Archibald wasn’t on Nantucket that summer because he’d enlisted in the army and was at training camp in Mississippi. Maximilian received a postcard from him that said, “Half the gents here have never seen the Atlantic, much less played croquet in ’Sconset. Take the old girl around in the bug and have a good time for me.” On September 16, that’s what they were doing-driving to Madaket. The mood between Lacey and Maximilian was more serious than normal, because of the war. Everyone sat by their radios listening for word on Hitler. The military used Tom Nevers Field as a training ground for landing in the fog; the coast guard patrolled the beach, looking for U-boats. There were piles of sandbags in the streets of town and all around them, men enlisting in the service. Lacey supposed it wouldn’t be long before Maximilian went away also. Then she would be left to drive the dune buggy to the beach alone.
When they reached Madaket, Lacey and Maximilian walked through the sand barefoot.
Maximilian said, “I brought you out here for a reason.”
Lacey laughed, but it was so windy her laughter was carried away. “You brought me out here because Sam wrote and said you should. You men, always sticking together!”
Maximilian’s necktie lifted in the breeze. “No, Lacey, that’s not it.”
And then, of course, she thought he was telling her that he was off for the war as well. You men, she thought, always sticking together. No wonder the armed forces worked. Men loved each other’s company; they loved a group, the bigger the better. And she thought, If Maximilian is going, I’ll enlist too. I won’t be left behind with the women, I just won’t.
But Maximilian said, “Lacey, I brought you here to ask for your hand in marriage, both hands, and the rest of you, for that matter, if you’ll have me. I promise to provide you with a home, and to give you the life you’re accustomed to as well as I possibly can-”
Lacey interrupted him by putting her fingers to his lips. She remembered that too, the way his warm lips felt under her fingertips. “Yes,” she said. “The answer is yes.”
She held tight to that memory, and to the flood of happiness it brought her, even though two months later Maximilian did join the service and was gone from her for three years. Those were days when love meant something because it stood side by side with life and death. Those who survived had a reason to be nostalgic, and she, Lacey, had survived.
Mack waited for her to speak. What could she say? Things were so different these days she could hardly understand them. “You’re doing the right thing,” she said finally.
Relief crossed his face like a ray of light.
“Thank you,” he said. “I was hoping we’d have your blessing.”
“You always have my blessing, Mack Petersen,” Lacey said. And that much, at least, was the truth.
When Cecily found out Mack and Maribel were getting married, she experienced envy like a slap across the face. She heard the news from Maribel, over the phone.