The Measure(89)

And the pair swayed back and forth together on the tiny makeshift dance floor, holding each other close.

That’s why, darling, it’s incredible

That someone so unforgettable

Thinks that I am unforgettable, too.





Amie




Everyone around Amie stood up and headed for the patch of dance floor, leaving Amie alone at her table, admiring her sister and Maura as they weaved through the clusters of guests. She couldn’t believe she had almost missed this. Thankfully, she had arrived at Nina’s door just in time, overflowing with regret and apology. Only a few days later, Nina had called her to say that the formal wedding had been scrapped, replaced by an intimate dinner after a ceremony at City Hall.

Amie tried to focus her eyes on the dancers and stop staring at Ben, who was seated across the room, with the other members of his and Maura’s support group. Amie had been too nervous to approach him earlier, and she assumed that Ben was understandably waiting on her. She was the one who had left his confession unanswered, after all.

She had already planned what she was going to say to him, some polite speech about wanting to stay friends, but as she watched Ben laughing alongside a pregnant brunette in a modest pink dress and a strawberry blonde with a spray tan, Amie felt inexplicably upset that he would be laughing with any woman who wasn’t her. She felt her face growing flush and her heartbeat quicken. She was being completely ridiculous, she thought. She was a twenty-nine-year-old woman, for god’s sake, not some jealous preteen.

Amie thought that she had made up her mind about Ben, that it would be safer to never act on her feelings.

But maybe she was wrong.

The song was still playing, she still had a chance. But would Ben even be willing to speak to her?

She drew a breath and walked over to his table.

“I’m sorry if I’m interrupting,” Amie said shyly. “But I thought I’d see if you’d like to dance.”

There was a brief pause before Ben smiled, and the relief warmed her body like sunlight.

“Of course,” he said.

They moved together toward the center of the room, and Ben took the lead, his arm lightly encircling her waist.

It was Ben who ventured first.

“I was beginning to think you never wanted to talk to me again.” He narrowed his eyes and raised his brow.

He was teasing her, Amie realized. A second relief.

“It wasn’t you, it . . . I . . . Nina and I were going through a rough patch,” Amie explained. “And it’s honestly all I could think about these past few weeks.”

“Oh,” Ben said. He looked genuinely concerned. “Is everything okay?”

“It is now.”

“So that just leaves you and me. And my letter.”

“How did you figure it out?” Amie asked.

“Well, there were all these little hints, about you and where you lived and where you worked, and finally it all clicked when you mentioned that letter about Gertrude,” he said. “Although I suppose I did take a bit of a risk that I had gotten it all wrong and the real ‘A’ would have been quite confused.”

Amie laughed, and she could feel Ben’s arm tightening around her. She stepped closer toward him in response.

“I’m sorry I’m not much of a dancer,” he said.

“Oh please, all of my recent dance experiences have been chaperoning students who seem to forget that their teachers are watching.”

“So you have to forcibly separate the poor hormonal kids?”

“Sometimes, yes,” she admitted, “but not if they look like that . . .” Amie nodded toward Nina and Maura, twirling along the edge of the crowd.

“They look so happy,” Ben said.

“And completely oblivious to anyone else.”

Ben shrugged. “That’s how it’s supposed to be, right?”

He was looking at Amie with such kindness, such sincerity, that she needed to break away from his gaze for just a moment. She leaned her body in even closer, until her chin hovered above his shoulder, and her eyes landed safely on the back wall, while the music drifted around them.

And Amie thought of all the times that she had wondered about the person on the other side of her letters, and how remarkable it was that she was actually with him now, feeling his warmth and breathing in his cologne. Amie felt her body relax, at ease with Ben, as if they had danced together many times before.

Amie closed her eyes and tried to imagine the future, the way she always had, with the lawyer and the poet and the handful of other men who had held her in their arms over the years.

She pictured herself with Ben in Central Park, sitting on a bench near the lake, and painting the walls of a bare apartment with rollers. She saw herself in white, holding his hands before her, and then smiling in a hospital bed, both of them kissing the bundle in her arms.

She could see each scene quite clearly; they weren’t blurred like some of her previous daydreams. She could see it, and she could almost feel it. And something about it felt right.

Unlike her visions of the men before, there were no caricatures of Ben’s flaws. The problem holding Amie back wasn’t a blemish in Ben’s character, the fault not in himself but in his stars.

Amie blinked, and she saw herself standing in the grass, with two small children dressed in black, and then weeping inside a cramped kitchen, alone this time, while pots and pans and lunch boxes littered the counter before her.