Emily smiles at me. "I guess now is a good time to present you with a little something."
She reaches into her purse and retrieves a small envelope the color of parchment. There’s a distinct crease pattern in it, indicating something somewhat more three-dimensional than your average card is inside.
I take the envelope and carefully lever it open with my thumb. I’m not sure why I’m so OCD about envelopes, but I’ve always opened them with an eye towards having as little mess and tearing of paper as possible. Emily, ever supportive, has pretty much decided to live with it, and she waits patiently. Her eyes, though, belie the excitement behind them.
Before I can retrieve the card, a small brass pin falls from the envelope to land in my palm. The fastener on the back is dull from age. I turn it over to find a worn emblem, like that of a compass rose.
She knows I like Disney pin trading; it’s an unfortunate hobby that I fall into when I visit this place. It’s funny, though. I get Really Seriously Into pin trading when I’m here, only to completely forget about it once I leave. I guess you could call it Schrodinger’s hobby – its existence depends on how it’s measured.
That said, though, the icon of the compass rose is a very interesting choice – and to understand why, I need to rewind a bit, back to February of this year.
See, back then, Emily and I went to the jewelry store in Atlantic Station and I tried to explain to the salesman exactly what I was looking for in a ring. (This means that the concept of marriage had pretty much always been on the table. It’s just the execution of the proposal that’s a surprise.) I spent the next hour and a half explaining to the extraordinarily patient salesman just what I wanted, which is to say, a ring carrying the motif of a compass rose.
While the jewelers weren’t able to make that happen, right now, I’m sitting across the table from someone who remembered our motif months after it was mentioned. It hadn’t been brought up since.
Before I can articulate my inability to process this, our waiter Robert reappears. He’s carrying a splendid dessert tray laden with two ceramic bowls and two little squares of chocolate. Each one is, upon closer inspection, a note written in gold lettering upon a dark chocolate backdrop. One reads “Happy Birthday,” while the other reads “Happy Anniversary.”
As cool as this is, I’m a bit confused. “Wait, I didn’t tell him it was our anniversary and your birthday, did I?”
“Or, you know, he just read your pins,” Em says. I look down and I’m still wearing the button they gave us at the hotel lobby.
“Oh, that. Right.” I’m wearing a sheepish expression.
The ceramic crockery turns out to contain crème brulee. “Maple crème brulee,” Robert says, after watching this little episode between us. “Give it a try.”
As with so many things this trip, we dig in to this new experience. Now, I’m no great connoisseur of fancypants French desserts or anything, but I’d have thought the addition of a maple syrup flavor would have overpowered the taste of the cream and the crystallized, torched sugar crust atop it. It doesn’t. Sure, it’s sweet, but not much more so than any other crème brulee I’ve had, and the maple adds a nice, aromatic and woodsy heft to the crust. Which, I might add, is properly thick – there’s no replacement for a good thick crust on a crème brulee.
Somewhere in the melee, the bill gets paid, and yes, it’s expensive, and you know what? So what. This has been brilliant, this entire day. Here I am, towards the conclusion of this first part, with an amazing meal inside me and one last mystery left to work on.
I dare not say it, for fear of breaking some imperceptible spell, but the thought hasn’t left my head. Is Emily on the same wavelength as me? Is she thinking in terms of us as a couple, a unit, an abstract concept that extends past the now and into the forever?
“This is Pin,” reads the card. “Pin needs your help to find his brothers Cuff and Link. They will be presented to you by your Bride on your wedding day, but everything else is uncertain.”
As thick-skulled as I can be sometimes, that’s a pretty strong hint towards yes. And it’s all the tacit acknowledgement I need to press on with the plan.
“Em,” I say, looking across the table into those big, steel blue eyes, “you are amazing.”
A grin, equal parts the facetious and the affectionate, plays across her face. It tells me everything before her words confirm it.
“I know.”
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