The Vow I Made A Dying Stranger

MARRY ME. I WON’T SEE SPRING.

I stood there in the cold with the coffee going lukewarm in my hand and I did not understand a single thing about what I was looking at.

“Jim,” I said. “What is this.”

He looked worse than I had ever let myself notice. His color was wrong, a yellow-gray under his beard that I’d been telling myself for weeks was just the winter light. His hands shook taking the cup from me.

“The clinic on Fifth Street ran blood work last month,” he said. “Liver’s about done, Hannah. Doctor there gave me till spring if I was lucky. I wasn’t lucky.”

My heart folded in on itself. “I’m so sorry, Jim. I don’t know what to say.”

“Say yes,” he said. “Not for romance. I’m not fool enough to think you’d want an old drunk for a husband even if I had thirty more years in me, which I don’t. I’m asking because when I go, I don’t want them writing John Doe on a slab somewhere and burying me in the county field with the unclaimed. I want somebody to say my whole name over me. I want to belong to one person on paper before I belong to the dirt.”

I have always been too soft for my own good. Ask anyone in my family. I am the one who brings home the dog nobody else will take, the one who cries at the Folgers commercial every Christmas, the one my mother used to say would give away her last twenty dollars to a stranger with a sad enough story. I was single. I had nobody waiting on me to weigh in. And I was standing in front of a man who had never once, in two years, asked me for a single thing, finally asking me for the only thing that mattered to him.

“Okay,” I told him. “Okay, Jim. I’ll marry you.”

Brittany did not take it well. She sat me down at her kitchen table two nights later with her arms crossed and told me I had officially lost my mind, that I was about to legally marry a man I knew almost nothing about, a man who could have debts, a record, children somewhere, anything. I told her I understood the risk and I was doing it anyway, because Jim had two things he wanted before he died and one of them was a name on a marriage license and I was not going to be the reason he didn’t get it.

“And the second thing?” she asked.

“He wants somebody to claim his ashes,” I said. “He doesn’t want to end up in a drawer in the county building that nobody ever opens again.”