It is my father.
“I just had the best conversation with Pat,” my dad gushes. “He’s hilarious. He’s kind. He’s great. I can see why you guys love each other so much.”
I burst into tears.
“I’m sorry for before,” I tell my dad.
“So am I.”
When we finally travel to San Diego to meet my family, Pat charms them all—and is charmed by them in kind. It is the complete opposite of Blaine’s standoffishness and frequent looking away from my parents when we visited. It is so clear how much Pat respects them. He notices the sly hilarity of my mom, which no man has ever fully appreciated before, and he says of her bouncy walk, “She’s the most youthful woman in her seventies I’ve ever seen.”
All of the strangeness I long sought to hide from others, he just completely gets it. They are hilarious, weird, brilliant, deranged—and where I come from, always.
On our last night in town, my parents and my sister’s family all gather together for a big pizza dinner at Filippi’s, my favorite restaurant growing up, where I used to play with the dough as a little girl. There are a lot of moments that would normally be very stressful for me—my dad needs to sit in a certain place so he can see very partially out of his one eye, he knocks something over, the waitress doesn’t get his sense of humor, they’re out of everything. But I don’t feel on edge like I did with Blaine. I know Pat accepts me and isn’t judging me on any normal scale of What will the Joneses think?
The dinner is instead hilarious and fun, with my sister’s children taking over my Snapchat, and my dad and Pat swapping jokes nearly the entire dinner. At the end, my father proposes a toast.
“To Pat,” my dad says, raising a glass.
“To Pat,” my mom says, and then she can’t resist adding, “who is one funny motherfucker.”
I let out a huge belly laugh and Pat does, too. I feel so much love for her.
“Children are here, Mom!” my sister scolds, and her kids laugh.
Pat is sitting next to me, and as everyone talks, he squeezes my leg.
“Your family is so great,” he whispers to me. I feel relaxed, at ease, like all my selves are joining together.
ONE NIGHT IN late August, when I am anxiously trying to fall asleep but unable to do so, I get a text from Pat at 2:34 in the morning.
“I just thought of the perfect day we could get married,” his text reads.
My heart stops. I reread the text. Marriage? Is he screwing with me? We have been together now for seven months. Is this possible? Is this really happening?
“Yeah?” I reply, realizing that unlike other men who might bring marriage up to mess with your mind, he is 100 percent sincere.
“February 29,” he texts again. “We’d have an anniversary every four years.”
“That’s brilliant,” I write back.
“Then it’s decided,” he replies. “We’re engaged.”
I’m shell-shocked.
“!!!!!!!” I text back.
I spring up in my bed like I’ve been hit with a bolt of lightning. I blast Jay-Z’s “On to the Next One” and dance around in circles. When I was a kid, my mom would tell me to work out my energy by running around the pool. I wish I could do that right now, but instead I screen-grab his texts and make them my home screen.
Is this really happening?
When we meet up the next day in Bryant Park, Pat greets me with an embrace and holds me tight.
“We’re going to do this properly with a ring—the exact ring that you want—and I want you to be able to plan it out just how you want it,” he says. “Because this is like the ultimate getting-flowers-at-the-office competition, right?”
I kiss him gratefully. Pat understands how fun it can be to spike the ball.
“I want a ruby ring,” I say.
He touches my face gently.
“You do?” he asks.
The ruby ring has a particular sentimentality for us. When we first shared all our stories, Pat told me once about his grandma’s ring, which featured all of her grandkids’ birthstones.
As a little boy, four or five years old, he would touch the ruby stone and say, “That’s me!”
I want him to be able to do the same with mine.
“And we can do the public proposal on the steps of Times Square . . . and we can Periscope the whole thing so our friends and family can watch,” I say, on a roll now, so excited at the opportunity to go sky’s-the-limit.
“That sounds great,” he says.
On the day of the event, we wake up at 5 a.m., and I pick up a copy of the Daily News, which shows a picture of us in the top left corner.
“Tune in, see her yes face!” the headline reads, telling people to watch us Periscope the proposal later that day. It is like something out of a million vision boards I would never dare create.
“Mandy,” Pat says as a crowd watches on the red TKTS steps of Times Square and another one watches online, “I’ve been smitten with you since before we met for our first date. I couldn’t understand how you could still be single. We met on a stunt date over coffee. You told me stories. A lot of them involving sex. You mentioned how many dicks you sucked. It was magical. After our first date, I was still smitten, but I could kind of understand the still-single part.”
I am crying-laughing.
“Mandy, in all seriousness you’re the smartest person I’ve ever met. You’re the sweetest person I’ve ever met. You’re the funniest woman I’ve ever met. You’re the person on earth I always want to see the most.
