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“I just want somebody who can walk in and say, ‘He’s mine. I’ll take him.’” He looked at me. “That’s all. That’s the whole thing.”
And here is where I have to tell you the truth about myself, because it matters.
I was single. I’d been single for a long time. I was thirty-eight years old and I lived alone and I was very, very good at solving other people’s problems, mostly because I’d never learned how to sit with my own.
Larry was dying. He’d handed me a problem. A clean, solvable problem, with a form at the end of it.
And I had always been better at solving problems than walking away from them.
“Okay,” I said.
He blinked. “Okay?”
“Okay. Yes. I’ll do it.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Something moved across his face that I didn’t understand at the time. I thought it was relief. Later I’d wonder if it was something closer to guilt.
“You don’t have to decide right now,” he said.
“I just did.”
He nodded slowly. He folded up the cardboard sign and set it aside, and he never held it up again.
“Thank you,” he said. And then, because he was Larry: “Thank you.”
“That’s twice.”
“Thank you,” he said a third time, and grinned, and I punched him lightly in the arm, and that was how I agreed to marry a homeless man outside a subway station on a freezing Tuesday morning.
I told my friend Dana that night. Dana and I had worked together for six years and she was the only person I told anything to.
We were at the wine bar near the office, the one with the sticky tables, and I said it as casually as I could.
“So I’m getting married.”
Dana had her glass halfway to her mouth. She set it back down.
“You’re—what? To who? Sarah, are you seeing somebody? Since when?”