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had been central to our early relationship and a big part of my identity, so I was a little miffed when we arrived into Portland late and got into our rental car and she told me we needed to stop to see her cousin—a person I had never met and one she had not mentioned until that moment.
    â€œAre you kidding me? No way are we going to drive around Portland at almost midnight to go find some cousin you haven’t seen in five years,” I said.
    â€œWhy not? I’d do it for you.”
    â€œI wouldn’t ask you to. I wouldn’t ask you to go meet a stranger in the middle of the night after seven hours in airports and on planes when you had been planning this trip for months and months.”
    She wasn’t pouting, but her silence told me I had said the wrong thing. Family is first with Rebecca, pure and simple. There is nothing more important. Here I was being a jerk when all she wanted to do is stop by to see a family member. It was, unfortunately, a fight we would have more than once during the course of our marriage and in traveling together. It seems no matter where we are going, there’s always a cousin on the way or an uncle or an aunt or a great-aunt she’s never met before.
    We went straight to Freeport, where I booked a room in a hotel. The plan was to go to Bar Harbor the next day and after six years together and finally making this trip, she would have had to have been three points beyond stupid not to suspect that I had planned to propose. And I had. The next day, on top of Cadillac Mountain, overlooking the Atlantic and my favorite vacation spot in the world. But first we needed to unwind. The L.L.Bean store is open 24/7 365 days a year. There aren’t even locks on the doors. I was too excited not to take her there for a little middle-of-the-night shopping. I thought maybe some retail therapy would thaw her icy mood.
    Traveling in those first heady days after 9/11 was rough. Security was beyond tight, and it had taken every little bit of ingenuity I could muster to hide the engagement ring I had stashed in my pocket through security checkpoints and at the car rental place. Sometime between landing and checking in at the motel, I had stashed it in my backpack and very nearly left it there in the car when we parked in the lot behind the Bean store shortly after one A.M. But I got nervous. She rushed ahead to the bathroom and I ran back to our rented Hyundai to retrieve it, putting it back in my pocket as we walked around the store.
    She was tired. She was a little angry and I did what many men try to do—buy her affection. Though I was living in Section 8 subsidized housing and making a meager $20,000 as a junior reporter on a small daily newspaper, I bought her two coats and a few other items hoping to make her happy. I paid with a fresh credit card and we wandered through the store, upstairs, taking a seat at a farmhouse table with green legs and matching ladder-back chairs—a staple of the L.L.Bean “Home” catalog.
    â€œI really like this table,” I said. It was true. I liked the style and the fact that it seemed like it would fit well into my semirural life plan.
    â€œMe too,” she said, still a little coldly.
    â€œWe should register for it,” I said. It came out on impulse, with no real forethought.
    â€œWe should,” she said, and the tone got a little tenser. “Except we’re not engaged.”
    â€œWell, what if we were?”
    â€œBut we’re not,” she said, firmly, but with a brightening smile.
    â€œWhat if we were?”
    â€œBut we’re not!” This time more emphatically.
    â€œBut what if we were?” I asked, bending onto one knee, pulling the ring from my pocket, and sliding it across the table. “What if we were? Will you marry me?”
    Tears formed in the corners of her eyes and we embraced. She went to the restroom and used her cell phone to call her best friend. Operation “He