Stir by Jessica Fechtor Page B

rest of our lives.
    It’s also where I lived, for the first time, in an apartment all my own and learned that from inside of me, and me alone, I could spin this thing called home. My place was just a couple of blocks from Eli’s and I saw him most days, but I loved living alone. Just me and my green-and-yellow-tiled kitchen, my bedroom window that I could climb out of onto a wooden balcony, and my copious closet space, most of which remained empty, since at twenty-four, I didn’t yet have much stuff. I bought a kitchen table for twenty-five dollars from a woman whose husband had made it in college. I wrote the lesson plans there for the fifth grade class I was teaching and served my first solo-hosted meal there: cream of asparagus soup, zucchini quiche, and a baguette that I picked up from a bakery in Pike Place Market and stuffed with butter, garlic, and thyme. I didn’t have a blender, so I borrowed Eli’s to purée the soup, a soup I liked so much that I bought myself an immersion blender for all the puréeing I knew was yet to come. It was the first kitchen tool with a motor I’d ever owned. (Also, at twenty bucks, the first I could afford.)
    One morning in April, three Aprils after that first conversation on his dormitory steps, and nine months after I moved to Seattle, Eli told me to meet him by his car. He wouldn’t say where we were going. I should have known that something special was about to happen—he isn’t usually one for surprises—but I didn’t have a clue.
    We parked on First Avenue, about a block from Pike Place Market, and Eli led me into a storefront I’d never noticed before. There was jewelry on display, and suddenly I understood. He’d picked out a ring. He was about to propose. I’d forgotten about our conversation in the tent by the river, the ring he said he’d mapped out in his mind. I still didn’t remember when he introduced me to John, who looked more like a craftsman than a salesman, nor did I remember when John guided us behind the counter and handed Eli a small metal box. Eli opened it and removed a ring made of green wax, and that was when I got it. He hadn’t
picked out
a ring. This was the model for the ring he had
designed
.
    â€œSo . . .” he said, “what do you say?”
    We cast the ring together.
    We wanted a fall wedding, and six months later, on October 30, we had one. We were moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I’d been accepted into graduate school, so we decided to have the wedding not far from there, right outside of Boston, on the North Shore. My family came from Ohio, and his from New Jersey, and close friends from all over.
    The first snow of the season fell the night before the wedding, but by morning the temp had reached the midseventies, so we moved the ceremony outdoors and set up the chuppah facing the ocean. There was French toast and bluegrass and baskets filled with pomegranates, and several ladybugs that found their way into my veil. I could say more about that day, but I want to rewind a bit, to a morning in July a few months earlier, July 14, to be exact, when Eli and I went down to the Seattle courthouse and got married, just us.
    I refer to it now as “our first wedding,” though when we set out for the courthouse that day, we didn’t see it as a real marriage at all. I just needed a few months of health insurance between the end of my teaching job and the start of graduate school. I’d be going on Eli’s plan once we were married, anyway, so why not? Let’s get civilly married here in Seattle, right now, we figured, and save the thousands of dollars in Cobra fees. It was a formality, that was all. The real wedding would be the ceremony a few months later, with a rabbi and a long white dress and all the people we loved best.
    It was a Thursday morning, and we went down to the courthouse first thing. I wore a cream linen skirt and a green