He Proposed at the Restaurant Where I Waitressed in College, and Then His Mother Walked In

Part 1

David picked the restaurant on purpose.

I didn’t figure that out until later, sitting in the parking lot with mascara on my collar and my hand shaking around the little velvet box. But I should have known. He’d been too specific about the reservation. Too insistent on the corner booth by the window.

“You’re going to love this place,” he’d said in the car. “Trust me.”

Twelve years ago, I bussed tables at Marconi’s on Vine Street for $2.13 an hour plus tips. I was twenty. I wore a black apron that never came clean and shoes that gave me shin splints, and I saved every dollar so I could finish my last semester at Ohio State without asking my mother for anything.

I hadn’t been back once.

David didn’t know that part. Or so I thought.

We slid into the corner booth. The wallpaper was the same. Dark green with those tiny gold fleurs. The lamp on the table was the same brass one with the dent on the shade from where I’d bumped it a hundred times carrying trays. Even the smell was the same, garlic and old wine and that specific waxy candle they burned to cover the smell of the kitchen.

I put my napkin in my lap. My hands were doing something strange.

“You okay?” David asked.

“I used to work here,” I said.

He smiled. Really smiled, the kind that pushed all the way up into his eyes.

“I know.”

Something small and cold happened in the middle of my chest.

“How do you know?”

“Order first,” he said. “Then I’ll tell you a story.”

I couldn’t read the menu. The letters wouldn’t hold still. I ordered the linguine because it was the first word I recognized, and David ordered the veal, and the waiter, a boy who looked exactly like every boy I’d worked with, called me ma’am and refilled my water glass, and I stared at David and waited.

“I came here once,” he said. “In 2012. I was twenty-four. I’d just moved to Columbus for a job I hated, and my mother made me take her out to dinner because it was her birthday and I didn’t have anyone else to invite.”

I nodded slowly. 2012. I was here in 2012. Every night, six nights a week.

“She ordered a bottle of wine that was more than my rent,” David said, “and she spent the entire dinner listing everything wrong with me. My apartment. My car. The girl I was seeing. My haircut.”

He laughed, but not really.

“By the end of the meal I was so angry I couldn’t speak. I paid the check. I walked her to a cab. I came back inside because I’d left my coat, and I sat down at the bar because I could not get in my car and drive.”

He looked at me across the table.

“A waitress brought me a glass of water. She had brown hair pulled up with a pencil through it. She saw my face and she said, ‘Whoever it was, they’re wrong about you.’ And then she went back to her tables.”

The candle between us was flickering.

“She never took her tip money out of my check. I saw her do it. She just, she gave me the water, and she said that, and she walked away.”

“David,” I said.

“I looked for you,” he said quietly. “I came back three times over the next month. You weren’t on shift. And then I got transferred to Cleveland, and I met a woman who was very pretty and very cruel, and I spent six years thinking I deserved her because that’s what my mother had told me at that dinner.”

The velvet box came out of his jacket pocket. I didn’t see him take it out. It was just suddenly there on the tablecloth between us, next to the salt.

“Emma,” he said. “When I met you at that conference in March. When you laughed at my terrible joke about the projector. I recognized your laugh before I recognized your face.”

I couldn’t breathe.

“I would have loved you anyway,” he said. “But I wanted to tell you here.”

He was opening the box.

The bell over the front door jingled.

I don’t know why I looked up. Some instinct. Some old waitress reflex, table four just walked in.

An older woman was standing in the entryway, unwinding a cream-colored scarf from her neck, scanning the dining room.

Her eyes found our booth. Her hand froze on the scarf.

And David, still smiling at me, still holding the open ring box, had not yet turned around to see his mother.

—

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