The Decent Proposal by Kemper Donovan Page B

more than enough to feast on: one-night stands for the storybooks, pickup lines so bad they deserved a special section in Ripley’s, relationships that ran the gamut from short and disastrous to medium and middling to long with epic proportions, including one man who was delectably French and actually proposed to her, thereby forcing her to acknowledge she didn’t love him at all. She had zero regrets, but she was tired. The oats had grown; it was time to reap them. Though she could barely admit it to herself, it was such a depressing thought, her father’s diagnosis had spurred her to settle down in a way her mother’s gentle (sometimes not so gentle) prodding never could: as a reminder both that life in general was short and that his life was short, and that if he was ever going to witness his only child getting married, ever going to meet at least one of his grandchildren, she’d better get a move on. And as much as she had avoided the issue till now, she knew without the aid of any fountains that the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with was the same person who watched old Friends episodes with her after every breakup (better than any comfort food, plus fewer calories); the boy who had become a handsome man by the end of college exactly as she had predicted, but who had continued to grow better-looking with the passing of each year so that now, on the verge of thirty, his physical beauty at times downright alarmed her; the ex she had so foolishly, idiotically discarded.
    There was no question: she was majorly, totally, butt-crazy in love with Richard Baumbach.
    True, this love was mixed up with a separate yet similar flavor: the love between best friends. Maybe this was why it had taken so long to recognize. It was like blending two grape varieties into one fine, delicately flavored wine and being expected to taste them both in a single quaff—not impossible, but requiring a mature, sensitive palate. For the greater part of hertwenties she’d simply been swilling it, getting drunk off it, and it had been fun, but it was also a mess. Now she was ready to appreciate what she had, to do the whole glass-swirl/nose-dip/mouth-swish thing without even laughing, to treat it all as solemnly as it deserved.
    But was she too late? Suddenly she found herself trapped inside a real-life My Best Friend’s Wedding , playing  Julia Roberts to his Dermot Mulroney with one key difference. The opening of that movie had always rung false to her—Julia waxing eloquent about some dumb pact she and her best friend had made to marry by a certain age. The audience was supposed to believe that Julia had been determined to marry him before she found out he was going to marry somebody else. The real way it would have happened, of course, was that she wouldn’t have realized he was the one until learning about the other girl. It was an ugly emotion—the same impulse by which a child abandons a toy and wants it back only when her younger sibling shows interest: you can’t have it; it’s mine! Mike could smell the studio note a mile away: “we can’t have our heroine be so unlikable.” It was a good note. Because it was exactly how she had reacted when Richard told her about the Decent Proposal. And she had been able to experience firsthand what a cheap and ugly feeling it was.
    Richard, feckless and freewheeling, incapable of holding down a relationship in all the years since she’d broken up with him—as if he, too, had been waiting till she simply came to her senses and took him back—was suddenly no longer available to her. It was easy to disregard all his one-night stands with whatever pair of tits he happened to be staring at when the bar lights came up (she teased him constantly about his unrepentantly slutty ways). But the Decent Proposal was not so easily dismissed. It was, after all, a decent proposal, and the fact that she didn’t quite know what to