lying, that night in the hospital when he’d told Marian Goodnight he’d been getting into poetry. Maybe it’d only been one poem, back then, but by now, he’d made something of a habit of it. He went to all of Marian and Emily’s monthly readings, even the ones Nora couldn’t attend, and in between those, he got Marian’s suggestions and studied them. He signed up for an email that sent him a poem first thing in the morning, and he read each one, even the weird, too-long ones that he wasn’t sure he understood. Upstairs in their apartment, on a new set of shelves he and Nora had put in together, he had a few collections of his own, sitting in a tidy row beside the framed photograph of his parents. Poems he could say from memory, some of them that he’d ended up picking for tonight.
He hadn’t been subtle about it, because that wasn’t poetry night’s style; the first one he’d ever attended had been poems about summer on an early-summer night. So he wanted every poem tonight to be about love, forever love, and before Marian—the natural first reader of the night—was even all the way through hers, Nikki Giovanni’s “You Came, Too,” Nora had leaned over to him and whispered, “You know I’m going to say yes, right?”
He’d nodded calmly, his heart hiccupping, and squeezed her hand.
They listened and laughed throughout the readings—Jonah’s annoyance not to be reading about baseball, and Kay’s accompanying good-natured heckles from the audience. Gerald’s and Sally’s stilted but charming trade-off of lines from Shakespeare; Mrs. Salas’s teary rendition of one of Will’s favorites, a James Weldon Johnson poem about beauty that never got old. Emily’s quiet but moving recitation, barely audible but deeply genuine, and Dee’s follow-up full-throated, contrasting performance.
When it was Will’s turn, finally, Nora was dabbing a tissue under her eyes and the masses were getting restless, Benny jokingly calling out for the big finish, Mr. Salas rubbing his hands together in anticipation. Will stood and thanked everyone, and then he looked at Nora and wasn’t nervous at all. He saw this one so clearly in his mind; he knew this one by heart. Eight lines, even shorter than the first poem he’d ever read for her.
“This one’s by Mary Oliver,” he said. “So I’m pretty sure Nonna would approve.”
And when he got to the very last line—“no more words now”—he dropped to his knee in front of Nora, and she whispered his favorite words, I love you, and followed up with the answer he’d been waiting all night, all his life, to get.
Yes.
Acknowledgments
Something that always keeps me going when I am writing a book is the prospect of getting to write this specific section—a joyful part of the process where I get to express some of my gratitude to the many people who make it possible for me to do this work. The list is long and by necessity incomplete, especially for this book, which I wrote during what I would call a . . . very difficult time. So before I begin, what I would say is that I end this book with a heart full of gratitude and a head full of names, many of which cannot appear here.
That includes the names of so many readers, bloggers, booksellers, and librarians—you are always the first! Thank you so much for the pleasure you take in books, and thank you for the work you do to share them with the world. Thank you for your notes of encouragement and excitement, which mean more to me than I can say. I hope you loved Will and Nora, and I am so grateful for the support you have shown to me and to my work.
Every time I finish a project, I send it along to my editor, Esi Sogah, and my agent, Taylor Haggerty, with a happy closing line of “We did it!” Both of these incredible women usually try to correct me, to say that I’m the one who did it, but I’d like to state for the record (it’s in print now!) that they are both incredibly wrong. In the first place, both of them usually have to spatula me off a parking lot of despair at the halfway point; in the second, both of them are sharp readers and savvy coaches, and I am so grateful to them both. Taylor, thank you especially for your total faith in me and your regular, cheerful reminders that I am, in