Free A Cup of Comfort for Couples by Colleen Sell Page B

at this time of year, this time of day, in this ridiculous cold. I begin to worry about frostbitten appendages. All I want is to get back to the motel to soak in another hot tub and warm up. My ears hurt. My feet hurt. My toes hurt. My fingers hurt. I am imagining blackened toes. My nostrils are frozen together. I am not in a good mood.
    At this point, romantic Sam, yelling over Niagara’s rage, chooses to ask me once more, “Wanna get married?”
    I look at him. I am sure I heard him right this time. First, he threatens not to propose while we fight about directions to Niagara Falls. Next, he proposes from the doorway while he’s still watching TV and I’m taking a bath. And now, while I am freezing alive in subzero weather with my nostrils frozen shut causing me to nearly suffocate, he proposes once again. I have to answer him, but my teeth are chattering. It hurts when the air goes down my windpipe. My eyes are tearing. Icicles are forming on my cheeks and they are not from the classic tears of joy one might expect. I’m thinking that this is about as romantic as Sam can muster: Niagara Falls in the background, the two of us together on vacation, a run-of-the-mill motel room with pornographic pencil drawings above the bed’s headboard.
    As I’m about to chatter out an answer, Sam loses all the color in his face. He turns bright green and vomits over the railing into the frozen Niagara Falls below. Then he vomits some more. He vomits all the way back to the motel, all through the night, and never again asks me to marry him.
    The ten-day trip that we so diligently planned suddenly comes to a screeching halt. We are heading home to New Jersey. Sam is too sick to have fun. I am driving with Sam stretched out on the back seat, groaning. And now I am angry.
    Before this trip I hadn’t given a single thought to getting married. Now Sam has put the thought in my head and cruelly pulled it off life support. All the way home, I’m incredibly angry with Sam. In my mind, I replay the scene of him calling me a clean freak. Then I replay him vomiting over the railing into the pounding waters of Niagara. I even embellish the story by having the vomit freeze midway down before it hits the water below. I have hundreds of miles to drive and aggravate myself about my almost-proposal. I mumble under my breath while Sam writhes in self-inflicted pain. I have no pity. I manage to drive on every torn-up road from Canada to New Jersey, and I speed joyfully over every speed bump. I deliberately swerve and take corners on two wheels.
    Twenty-five years later, I still remind Sam that I never actually said yes to any of his proposals. Then I suggest going out for ribs.
    â€” Felice Prager
    This story was first published in Sasee Magazine , April 2010, under the title “Waiting for the Right Answer.”

Built with Tender Loving Care
    B oxes of half-finished stories almost floated out of the storage loft. My files labeled “Miscellaneous Writing Ideas” danced their way to the front of the old file cabinet.
    No more red ink. No more late nights writing encouraging comments on student papers, from nervous Laotians to anxious middle-aged men newly laid off from a factory closing. I was done. Though I had loved my teaching job, it had taken its toll and I was worn out. My brain felt worn out. Now, my time was my own. Retirement! Plus, our two children were grown and had left the nest.
    Life, fate, whatever you call it, has a way of interrupting one’s plans, and just as my dream was unfolding, my husband decided to retire, too, and to pursue his dream of developing lots. He wanted to build a house “on spec,” as it’s called. We had more land than we needed and through the years had talked of doing this, but it had always seemed just a distant idea. Now, here he was, at the kitchen table — barely past the last toast at his own retirement party — making concrete plans to