Julian has always been the kind of person who notices the things most people miss.
Not birthdays.
Not anniversaries.
Anybody can save those dates in a phone and let an app remind them.
Julian notices the smaller things.
The things you never think to ask someone to remember.
He can tell I’ve had a terrible day before I say anything.
I’ll walk through the door, set my keys down, and he’ll look at me from across the kitchen.
“Bad day?”
I used to ask how he knew.
He’d shrug.
“Your shoulders.”
Or sometimes,
“The way you put your keys down.”
He knows I reach for kettle-cooked salt-and-vinegar chips whenever I’m stressed.
So when I have an important deadline, a bag somehow appears beside my laptop.
I never see him put it there.
And he remembers March 14th.
The day my grandmother died.
Her name was Ruth.
For several years of my childhood, Grandma Ruth was essentially the person who raised me.
My parents had separated.
Mom was working two jobs.
So from age seven until I was twelve, I lived in Grandma’s small yellow house on Poplar Street.
She grew tomatoes in the backyard.
Old country songs were almost always playing somewhere in the house.
She could whistle through two fingers louder than anyone I had ever met.
And she cheated shamelessly at Scrabble while insisting she had never broken a rule in her life.
Grandma died nine years ago.
March 14th.
For the first few years after she passed, every March was difficult.
I talked about her constantly.
Sometimes I cried.
Sometimes I told Julian stories he had already heard several times.
Eventually, though, I stopped mentioning the date.
I didn’t want every March to become a month of sadness.
And I didn’t want Julian to feel responsible for carrying it with me.
Then, three years ago, March 14th arrived.
Julian came home holding one sunflower wrapped in brown paper.
Just one.
He handed it to me in the kitchen.
I stared at the flower.
“What’s this?”
He looked almost confused by the question.
“I heard you talking to your cousin at Christmas a couple years ago,” he said. “You said your grandmother hated roses.”
I stared at him.
“She did.”
My voice started shaking.
“She thought roses were too dramatic. She called them show-offs.”
Julian smiled.
“And sunflowers?”
I laughed through tears.
“She said sunflowers were honest. They just turn toward the sun and don’t pretend to be anything else.”
He held the flower out again.
“I figured she would approve.”
I cried so hard I ended up sitting on the kitchen floor.
That is Julian.
Warm.
Patient.
Attentive in a way that has always made me feel safe.
Like coming home at night and seeing the porch light already turned on.
We met when we were twenty-three.
In a grocery store.
Very romantic.
I was standing in the dairy aisle trying to choose milk when I reached for a carton of two percent.
Someone else reached for the same carton at exactly the same time.
Our hands touched.
I looked up.
Tall man.
Messy brown hair.
Glasses.
A shopping basket containing an embarrassing number of frozen pizzas.
“Oh,” he said. “Sorry. You take it.”
“No, you take it.”
“You were first.”
“No, you were.”
He laughed.
“You saw me?”
“You were reading yogurt labels for three minutes.”
“They’re confusing.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“How?”
“Why does some yogurt have fruit mixed in and other yogurt hide all the fruit at the bottom? Who decided that?”
I laughed.
Ten minutes later, we were sitting in the café across the street.
Neither of us ever bought the milk.
Twelve years later, we were married and still choosing each other.
Our life had become almost wonderfully predictable.
Julian left for work at 7:30 every morning.
He worked as an accountant downtown.
Coffee in a travel mug.
One sugar.
A little milk.
Forehead kiss before leaving.
If work wasn’t too busy, he called me around lunch.
“Just wanted to hear your voice.”
