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Modern Love
The origin of the promised word is “truth,” but my sound is a lie.
By Maureen Stanton
I flew from Boston, where I grew up, back to Michigan, where I had moved five years earlier to live with my boyfriend, Steve. As I was looking for a package of pretzels from the flight attendant, she grabbed my left hand and said, “Oh, your ring is gorgeous. Are you engaged?
“Yes, I said. It’s less difficult to explain.
I was relieved that she hadn’t delved into the subject, wondering when I was going to get married. I said “never” because my fiancé, Steve, had died. In fact, he hadn’t even been my fiancé.
I met Steve in upstate New York, where we had worked temp jobs, he as an electrician traveling for union work and I as a bartender at the Hitching Post in Wappingers Falls, a post-college period to save money for a backpacking trip. Europe.
At Hitching Post, Steve and I stopped. He was tall, lean, and muscular after pulling wires all day at commercial structure sites. With his blonde-curled hair and sleepy blue eyes, he was attractive in a way that caught other people’s attention. When we walked in public, it seemed to Steve that other people became heliotropic.
Meeting Steve was the closest thing I had to love at first sight. After our first date, we spent each and every day together, perhaps because we knew our love story was going to end. I went to Europe that summer, and he would return home to Michigan at the end of his contract to finalize his divorce. In 11 countries in Europe, I wore his thirsty cotton blouse in my already overloaded backpack, and every day I pushed my face into my blouse to invoke him.
When I returned to the United States, I wasn’t sure if we would still be in love; I had been gone for two months, ever since we had known someone else, but when he met me at the Detroit airport, we fell into our state of contentment and soon after, I moved there to live with him.
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