He came to our house to ask my mother.
He was nineteen. He put a jacket on to do it. He had four hundred and eleven dollars saved from two summers at the cannery and a ring in his pocket from a shop in Ashmere.
And Adele Meade sat him down at our kitchen table and told him the truth about where we were.
We were losing that house. I did not know that either; I found out in the September when we moved to the flat over the chemist.
She told him I had a place on the nursing programme starting the following autumn and that I was going to give it up and go full-time at the plant.
And then she asked him — and he was very clear on the telephone that she asked, she did not tell — to give it a year.
Because if he proposed that summer, I was going to marry him instead of going, and she knew it, and so did he.
He agreed.
And then he went to Carrow Street with the ring money and bought my father’s guitar back off that shop for a hundred and forty dollars, and took it to my mother, and asked her to give it to me and not say where it came from.
PART 4 — NOVEMBER
She never gave it to me.
She could not, because giving it to me meant explaining where it came from, and she had just asked a nineteen-year-old boy to disappear for a year and she was not going to have that in the house.
In the November of 1986 she wrote to him at college.
She told him I was engaged.
I was not. I have never been engaged in my life.
I do not know why she wrote it and I am never going to, because she died in 2004 and I did not ask her a single useful question in eighteen years.
Gil believed it. He was twenty and he was three states away and it came from my mother.
He married Marianne Coyle in the spring of 1987 and they had thirty-one years and two sons and she died in 2018, and he has told me, and I believe him, that he was a good husband and that he loved her.
