I was flying from Boston, where I grew up, back to Michigan, where I had moved five years earlier to live with my boyfriend, Steve. As I reached for a packet of pretzels from the flight attendant, she grabbed my left hand and said, “Oh, your ring is beautiful. Are you engaged?”
“Yes,” I said. It was easier than explaining.
I was relieved that she didn’t pursue the subject, ask when I was to be married. I would have had to say, “never,” because my fiancé, Steve, was dead. He had never even been my fiancé, really.
I had met Steve in New York State where we had both been working temporary jobs, he as an electrician traveling for a union job, and me bartending at the Hitching Post in Wappingers Falls, a post-college stint to save money for a backpacking trip across Europe.
At the Hitching Post, Steve and I hitched up. He was tall and lanky, muscular from pulling wire all day at industrial construction sites. With his mop of blonde curls and sleepy blue eyes, he was handsome in a way that caught people’s attention. When we walked in public, it was Steve who people turned toward heliotropically.
Meeting Steve was the closest I had come to falling in love at first sight. After our first date, we spent every day together, perhaps because we knew that our love affair was fated to end. I had my European trip that summer, and he would return home to Michigan when his contract ended, to finalize his divorce. Across 11 countries in Europe, I carried his striped cotton T-shirt in my already overstuffed backpack, and every day I pressed my face into the shirt to conjure him.
When I returned to the States, I wasn’t sure that we would still be in love; I had been gone for two months, as long as we had known each other. But when he met me at the Detroit airport, we fell into our happy state, and soon after I moved there to live with him.
