That should have been information.
Pamela Gable came into our lives two years before that afternoon.
She was thirty-eight, she worked in medical device sales out of Denver, and she seemed — I have gone over this several hundred times, and this is still the honest word — she seemed to understand.
She understood the interrupted dinners.
She understood a phone that had to stay on.
She understood that a man whose wife has died does not stop having had a wife.
And she was, as far as I could see, warm with my daughter.
She helped with a science fair project on erosion that involved four pounds of sand in my garage.
She went to a winter concert when I was stuck at Carson until nine.
She remembered that Hannah would not eat buttercream but would eat almost anything with strawberry in it, which is a thing I had to be told twice.
One night in my kitchen, drying a pan, she said: “I don’t want to replace her mother.
I want Hannah to know that loving me isn’t a thing she has to feel guilty about.”
I have thought about that sentence more than any other sentence anyone has said to me in my adult life.
It is a beautiful sentence.
It is exactly the right sentence.
And I have come to understand that it is also the sentence you would say if you had worked out what the man in front of you was most afraid of.
I proposed four months later.
We planned a small wedding at Pine Crest Manor, southwest of Colorado Springs — a lodge with a garden terrace and a wooden arbor and a view of pine hills going up toward the Front Range.
Sixty-one chairs.
String lights between the beams.
See more on the next page