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.3:26.I doffed my clothes and climbed into the shower.Scattered as I was, I gave silent thanks that I’d remembered not having underwear at Lainie’s and had swung by my place to fetch a pair.Otherwise, I’d be stuck in the ones that had just traveled nearly three hundred sweaty miles or I’d be going commando: equally unappetizing possibilities.Out of the shower, I looked at my face in Lainie’s bathroom mirror, and I saw the valleys cut into it by the dribbling out of time.The thing is, I looked better, healthier, happier than I had in a long time.And I was.The cheeks that had been gaunt and drawn a year earlier were chubby and hale.I smiled, a big, goofy grin that didn’t make me self-conscious in the least.I couldn’t have erased it if I’d tried.3:48.For the first time in my life, I confronted a problem borne by a fat person.I couldn’t get my damn cummerbund to stay where it belonged.I’d suck air in, pull it up, breathe out, and feel it slip toward my hips.And then I’d repeat the exercise.Cuff links, too, presented what the kids called a first-world problem.I leaned into Lainie’s dresser with my left arm, turned the palm up toward me, and tried to wrangle the works with my free right hand.Failing that, I got my teeth involved.Finally, I had the link in and switched arms and fought through the maneuver again.Sweat beaded on my upper lip and my brow, and I could feel it pooling in the small of my back.Damn my bright idea of doing this on one of the hottest days of the year.At last, I wriggled into my rented tux jacket, and the bedroom became a sauna.I took it off again and set it on the bed.It could wait till the last possible second.4:23.I sat on the couch and pushed the ring box to the center of the coffee table.The guy at Montague’s said I had exquisite taste.That may be true—I rather liked the single stone in a simple platinum display—but I think he was just happy to get the credit account.I pulled back the box and opened it, then shoved it back to the table’s center.I retrieved it, closed the box, stood and stuffed it into my right pocket, and sat down again.Up once more, I carried it to the kitchen, opened the box again, and set it inside the refrigerator.I closed the door.No.No.No.I opened the door and removed the box, and I held it in my right hand as I consulted my watch.4:34.The hum of a motor, the squeal of turning wheels, and I dashed across the room in my high-sheen lace-up shoes to the bedroom, where I gathered the jacket.My right arm hung up in the sleeve as I tried to shimmy into it, and the ring tumbled from the box to the floor at my feet.The slamming of a car door.I knelt as gently and as quickly as I could and swept up the ring.The sound of steps on the walk.I ran a hand over my hair.The key in the door.I ran back to the front room and positioned myself on the linoleum in front of the door.4:35.I smiled.I think I smiled.I’m pretty sure I smiled.I pulled my cummerbund up.A crack of sunlight in the darkened room, and then more than a crack.I asked Marlene Morley to marry me on September 12, 1985.We’d driven down to Denver to see, God help us, Ratt in concert at McNichols Arena.In fairness to us, Ratt was just an accessory to our hair-metaled crime.We’d really gone down there to see Bon Jovi, the opening act that in just a couple of years would be the hottest thing going.I can’t really defend our being there on artistic grounds, but I can say this: we were young, we were in love, and we liked loud music.We’d taken midweek days off—Marlene from her nursing job at Deaconess, me from the Buttrey’s on Thirteenth where I worked in the produce department until the Herald-Gleaner brought me aboard—and had headed for Colorado in my Datsun 720 pickup, which was making its final brave stand a year before that name would disappear and Nissans would multiply across the earth.When you’re in love, you can conquer anything, even Wyoming, but we were no match for a blown water pump that left us stranded along northbound Interstate 25 on the return trip, in that great gaping maw between Cheyenne and Wheatland
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