A year later, he taught her to ride a bike.
She made him promise, absolutely promise, cross his heart, that he would not let go of the seat.
And then she rode half a block down the sidewalk before she realized he’d let go about thirty
eet back and had been running behind her the whole time, waving his arms.
“You said you weren’t letting go!” she shrieked, wobbling to a stop.
Brandon jogged up to her, out of breath, laughing. “And yet,” he said, “here you are. Still alive. Still upright. Funny how that worked out.”
She tried to stay mad. She really tried. She held onto it for about three whole seconds, arms crossed, glaring. Then she threw the bike down and launched herself at him and hugged him around the waist so hard he stumbled.
That was Brandon and Lisa. That was the whole thing, right there.
By the time he proposed to me, the two of them had their own inside jokes I wasn’t even part of.
Their own routines. Their own arguments, real ones, about whose turn it was to pick the movie and whether pineapple belonged on pizza. He wasn’t
laying at being a dad. He just was one, quietly, before anyone had made anything official.
He proposed at home, after dinner, because he knew I hated public attention and would have died if he’d done it in a restaurant with a violinist and everyone watching.
Lisa was supposed to be asleep. She was not asleep. She had apparently been crouched behind the hallway wall in her pajamas, because the second Brandon got down on one knee in our living room, I heard this enormous gasp from around the corner.
