love story

Annie AND Danny
  The Off Track Betting office was about twenty minutes away from our house. It‘s a store front in the
 midst of a large, unloved strip of apartment buildings on Coney Island Avenue. Inside, there are long
counters, seats made from some cracked plastic with peeling, faded vinyl covers, and fluorescent lights
thathum and flicker and hum. When it rains, the ceiling leaks onto a stack of newspapers near the front
                                            door. I hate it.

   Annie walked in the door on a frigid Tuesday morning in January. A nurse at Maimonides, she‘d just
finished her last of three doubles, wearing her scrubs underneath a flimsy spring coat. The slot machines
  weren‘t an enticement, for a couple of hours, anyway. Annie merely needed to call a tow truck for her
car, still parked in the lot at the hospital. Her cell phone battery had long since died. Danny gave her use
     of the back office phone and, without a word, offered her a mug of hot coffee, his gloves and his
                                           umbrella to take outside.

    Annie looked at this strange man, with his kind, blue eyes and his cracked-ceiling kitchen. The air
smelled vaguely of wet paint and stale coffee. She knew she should tell him not to stay, to leave his car
and wait for a tow. Instead, she found a plastic chair, called the tow truck for him, and talked to Danny
 for forty-five minutes. She knew that his mother died when he was twelve, that he never married, that
 he fed stray cats and rescued abandoned novels from the dumpster behind his apartment and that his
goal in life was to play in the same dive bar in Greenwich that Elvis had played in once. He didn‘t ask for
 her number. Annie scrawled it down on a cocktail napkin, folded it once, and put it in the small pile of
                                  paperclips and loose change on his desk.

In three days, Danny called. He wanted her to go to the diner with him again. She did. This time he took
 her to a place in Bensonhurst that had a juke-box in every booth. They ordered hamburgers with a lot of
  french fries and had a milkshake. Danny talked about the machines he made, the people he knew and
                           the horses he bet on but never seemed to win a race.

 In the end, they lived 32 years together. 32 years of leaky apartments in a part of town I rarely go into
anymore, of used cars we‘d spend whole weekends trying to fix, of working nights, of early mornings. He
  asked me to marry him five years into our relationship, in a diner, right in front of me. And I said yes
                               before he‘d even fully finished the question.

 When I graduated, Danny and I had already known each other for eight years. They married in a small
 courthouse, mostly because Danny argued it was a waste of money and Annie admitted he was likely
 right. She wore a cream-colored dress from sales rack and he, an ill-fitting, navy blue suit that she said

his brother had owned in college. Lunch was at the local diner. Danny sang to her, loudly off-key, in
                 their favorite red booth. It wasn‘t a grand wedding. It was just theirs.

He retired from the OTB in 1992, when the lease was up. They moved into a small, neat bungalow with a
  yard and a white picket fence in Staten Island, right on the bay. They painted the front door orange.
 Annie bought a used wheelchair for the walks to the little park around the block with their Jack Russell.
She stopped going to the gym. By that time, her knees had become unstable and her doctor prescribed
                                     rest. But life was pretty good.

After weeks of traveling in South America, I came back home and found Danny in his bed. I immediately
                             noticed that he had a cold and was feeling sick.

 A few months later Danny started to lose weight. Then came the cough. And the aches in his abdomen
and side. Annie, a nurse, knew there was something wrong long before he was willing to acknowledge it.
  The results of all the tests came as no surprise. Pancreatic cancer. Terminal. Too late to operate. No
hope. Danny met the news with his characteristic calm reserve. “Well, boss,” he said to the doctor, “looks
                      like the horse finally came in. And not the one I was betting on.”

  And when she finally broke down she was a minute‘s walk from him in her own house and so she just
   sobbed. But she didn‘t sob to Danny. Danny never saw her cry once. It would be pointless. Annie
                  hadspentthirtyyearsahead of time being the steadiness behind him.

        After his cancer was diagnosed, Danny only lived for fourteen months. Fourteen months of
 chemotherapy treatments, hospital bedsides and then at-home hospice with an aide doing most of the
  real hands-on care, under Annie’s patient supervision of what his needs were. Through the good days
    and the bad, the days that were pain-free and the days she gave him shots for the pain, he never
       complained, never once cried out why me. He just held on, and loved Annie the whole time.

 In the last weeks of his life, Danny made two requests of Annie. The first was to have her sign a post-
nuptual agreement, which he later tore up to her. The second was a surprise to her: to have their vows
                renewed, she says with a gentle lilt in her voice that betrays her emotion.

I wanted to give him one more gift back, to tell him I remembered every bit of that night, from the leaky
 ceiling over our heads to the cracked red booth we huddled in, to the off-key singing and the mediocre
             meatloaf. And he knew it, he just wanted to give me one last gift. “Yes,” I said.

Lucia was kind. There was hope in her, and she brought to us a bright red dress that was beautiful
 enough for an empress. It was from a Pakistani company called Deemas Fashion, who operate out of
Birmingham and hand-make all their wedding wear. Each piece takes three months to make by women
who emigrated from Multan and Faisalabad. They do not believe in fast fashion; only heirloom fashion.

The Sabr collection spoke toAnnie on a very personal level. Her mother had raised her with strict Islamic
guidelines, which included many forms of sabr. The Sabr gharara, deep forest green velvet, had intricate
  silver threadwork adorning the sleeves and trim, complementing the long white silk kameez with a
          matching dupatta. The entire outfit had a dignity, and beauty, she could connect with.

          “Green was his favourite colour,” Annie told Lucia. “He said it reminded him of life.”

 She carried a second box in her arms, carefully balanced on the wooden floor of the train‘s dining car. It
too had been handwoven by someone with enormous hands, sealed with wax. She didn‘t know where to
  take it, which house would be most suitable in which to don a dress made from fabric that seemed to
  have grown from the very soul of the earth. She finally decided the bedroom, now silent and peaceful
 with Danny asleep, would be fine. She tried the dress on, there. In the afternoon light, the forest-green
     velvet clung to her second skin. Silver thread embroidered the top, winding down like vines. Her
    reflection, caught in a wall of dark glass, seemed to promise that although this last act of love was
                              heartbreaking, it was something to be savored.

They used the space between the rows of tomato plants where they both had sat during the summers of
  their childhood. The small chapel near their garden was closed for reconstruction, so they performed
the ceremony outside, in the small square enclosed by rose bushes. The crowd numbered fewer than two
 dozen. In addition to their families, six of Danny‘s employees from the OTB were there. Danny was in a
                                  wheelchair, wrapped in a plaid blanket.

Walking down the grassy path, the velvet folds of her skirt trailed over her toes, stirring the forest-green
blades as she stepped into the cool shade of the olive branches. She went straight to Danny, as was her
                                                 duty.

                                “You‘re so beautiful,” he whispered back.

“Honey,” she said on the telephone, “You sound like hell. But then again, I‘ve always loved the way you
                                      sound when you‘re sick.”

My husband laughed. Oh, dear heaven, his laughter made a little rattling sob sound and all three other
          kids burst into tears. “That‘s my Annie,” he said and burst into tears with them.

Lucia cleared her throat, wiping a stray tear from her eye as she turned to begin the vows. There weren‘t
 any new ones, though, not really. Danny had struggled with the one that Annie had written so that he
                                wouldn‘t have to go through all of them.

  Annie, it was cold that day. Danny had offered me coffee after the meeting had been moved to the
    conference room. I remembered the feeling on the backs of my hands when I picked it up. I can‘t
remember the exact words he spoke when I sat down, but they were gentle, and they always have been.
 He gave me his coffee that day and he hasn‘t given me anything else since. That is not exactly correct.
                                   This is the last thing he gave me.

Then Annie turned on the speakerphone to talk to Danny. “Danny, I know you can hear this,” she began.
  Her voice started with a quiver, but it never broke. “You were a clerk in a betting office with a leaky
  ceiling. You were never rich, never famous, never anything the world calls successful. But you were
 successful where it mattered. You loved me. You loved our daughter. You loved the stray cats and the
customers who lost their paychecks. You have made me proud every single day. I will not say goodbye. I
            will say ‘see you later.’ Because I know you will wait. And I know I will find you.”

 They slid into a ring that felt similar enough, a slim band because Danny had dropped theoriginal ring
he‘d bought Annie somewhere inthe back garden years ago and they hadn‘t botheredsaying anyt about
 replacing it. Annie helpedhimput ring on her hand as he shook uncontrollably; they both giggled while
                                              the crowd cried.

 Then one morning eleven days later, Danny died. Annie was holding his hand. Outside the garden was
bursting with new life; tomato plants loaded with fruit were the best I‘ve ever seen. He waited until they
                                       were ripe. That was Danny.

At Danny‘s funeral, Annie wore a dark green velvet dress, embroidered with a sprig of olive branches on
 the left side, where he used to wear his carnations. Black felt wrong. Danny had been all about life. He
  used to say, Life‘s too short for sad colours. It fit him to stand by him while I sang his favourite song,
                                   unashamedly off-key, by his graveside.

   Every year on the anniversary of their wedding, Annie puts on the cream colored dress they chose
together, makes a pot of coffee, sits on the porch, and looks out at the tomato plants that still grow in
                               their little garden in the middle of town.

She thought of all the women in the factory, stitching their days with patient hands. She remembered the
  cold, dreary Tuesday when a stranger bought her a coffee as she waited on a bench. She remembered
feeling love the vast, ordinary love that was not so grand but was instead in the quiet choices made each
 day, in the showing up, even at painful moments. love was not about a happily ever after. It was in the
                    leaking room, in the betting office, in the kindness of a thin nurse.

   Each olive branch, is proof that this olive is real. A promise that there will be another leaf for every
                               promise, the promise broken still a promise.

 And I would give anything to know that someday, someone might discover these three young women in
their sewing room, working away in some small studio in a forgotten town called Birmingham, making a
    dress. The perfect dress. And when someone who looked like Annie pulls it from its drawer on an
      anniversary, or a special date like her birthday, he or she will know a love that will never end.