"If you tell me the whole building is going to lose power, at least wait until after dessert," she said when I introduced myself.
I remember laughing. There had been a difficult week at the hospital, and I wasn't in the mood for anyone else's emergency. But there was something about the way she refused to panic that made me want to stay near her. I replaced a failed breaker, checked the overloaded extension cords, and told her the lanterns could go back on only if somebody stopped trying to power an entire ballroom through one wall outlet.
She offered me a slice of cake after the guests left. We sat on the edge of the stage at eleven that night, eating from paper plates and talking about terrible childhood haircuts and the places we'd always meant to visit. At midnight she asked whether I knew a diner that served decent breakfast at ridiculous hours. I did. We went there together.
There wasn't a grand declaration in the beginning, just the pleasure of finding someone with whom I didn't have to perform. Natalie was quick, funny, ambitious, and generous with her attention. She noticed the waitress had a sore wrist and stacked our plates to make her work easier. She remembered the name of a coworker's sick dog three weeks after meeting him once. If I came to see her after a late shift, she would wait at the door with an extra coffee and insist that I tell her whether I had eaten.
For a long time, that was the woman I knew.
Our first apartment had windows that rattled whenever trucks crossed the intersection. We owned a secondhand couch, four mismatched plates, and a dining table I found abandoned beside a dumpster and refinished over two weekends. Natalie once told me that she loved the table precisely because it was imperfect. We ate our first Thanksgiving dinner there with my younger brother, Ben, and her mother, Eileen, crowded around it while rain slid down the kitchen window.
I proposed to her beside a lake on a September afternoon after I'd spent twenty minutes pretending we were simply out for a walk. She said yes before I finished asking. We married the following spring at a small venue with a leaking roof and a dance floor that dipped in the middle. The cake leaned to one side, my brother lost the rings for twelve terrifying minutes, and Natalie laughed so hard during our first dance that she had to put her forehead against my chest.
We didn't have much money, but we had a plan. She wanted to build a career in marketing and eventually run major events. I wanted to move into a leadership position at the hospital, buy a home with a decent garage, and stop worrying every time the truck needed a repair. Neither of us expected the other to give up those ambitions. We talked about them as though we were building two rooms in the same house.