Chapter 66—Rob

“I have a custom order,” I say. “From your brother.”

“You do?”

“Which means my very first custom order, and now my second, both came from Trig.”

“For what?”

“I’m sure you heard that Geo and Trig are having a baby. Mary and Luke are too, and they won the crib, I hear. So I promised Geo I’d make her an even nicer one.”

Brekka beams. “You better do it, too, or I’ll never hear the end of it.”

“You’re going to be an aunt,” I say. “How do you feel about that?”

“I don’t think it’s really sunk in yet,” Brekka says. “I’m giddy, and then I forget all about it. Then you mention it, and I’m giddy again. I want to squish a baby so badly.” Her eyes soften and lose their focus.

“Do you want one?”

She turns toward me slowly. “From the tips of my toes all the way to the top of my head.”

“Good to know,” I say. “Well, the piece I’m looking for is easy to spot, at least. Everything else has been cleared out. It’s the one piece I didn’t sell. It was a custom design, too, although the customer didn’t know about it.”

She weaves around the table saws and the drying wood, the belt sander and the sawhorses, following me until I reach the table I made. “At first I meant to make you a cabinet. It would have gone floor to ceiling, and been full of varying sizes of cupboards and drawers. Tall, short, large, tiny. There would have been drawers in the bottom, and each box and drawer would have held something different.”

“This is a table,” Brekka points out.

“Yep, I made you a table. A coffee table, in fact.”

“Why the change?”

“Because I was at my sister’s house, and her son climbed on top of a chair and pulled out a half dozen china plates, smashing them on the floor before she could stop him. They were on display, you see, and he realized they were beautiful.”

“And?” Her brow draws together.

“Well, I figured one day you might want children. I decided to make this child friendly right from the starting gate.”

She runs her hand across the top of the shiny, smooth, light ash wood coffee table.

“I intended to make this into a giant slab.” I run my hand down the side of the ash edge. “I left it live edge, as you can see. It’s finished, but the bark is still there.”

“Okay,” she says patiently.

I reach underneath and find the latches. “But if you loosen these, which you need to know how to do. I’ll show you later.” I slide the entire top part of the slab backward. It slides smoothly. “The table opens to reveal these boxes. Some large, some small. They’re hidden, because sometimes we can hide them. And we can choose what to display to the world.”

“Most of these are empty,” Brekka points out.

“You’ll notice there are twelve spaces,” I say. “I figure this table will last me ten years that way. But two of these spaces are already filled.”

I reach down and lift up a delicate porcelain teacup, the top part reddish brown, filtering down to deepest blue at the bottom. I hand her the teacup. “What do you notice about this?”

She takes it carefully and touches the edge. “It’s broken,” she says, “and repaired.”

I nod. “Through a process called Kintsukuroi.”

She shakes her head. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“In America, when we break something, whether it’s a dish, a bowl, or a toy, we usually throw it away. Or if we do keep it, we try and repair or glue it so that no one can see the break. We consider breakage and damage to be something to hide, to cover up, or something that destroys the value of the object.”

Brekka meets my eye with a questioning glance. “But this break is repaired in gold. It shines.”

“Ah, there you have the difference. But before I fully explain, let me tell you another story. On the day of your surgery, I slugged your brother in the face, nearly breaking his nose. I did it because he kept referring to you as someone who needed to be fixed. I told him you weren’t broken. I didn’t realize that I was wrong too until I left the hospital and took to wandering the streets of New York.”

Brekka flinches, her eyes injured.

“I stumbled, angry, emotional and upset, into a pottery shop. The man there showed me something I’d never seen or heard of. Kintsugi pottery has been broken, and repaired. But the art of Kintsukuroi celebrates the breaks, because they’re a part of our history. They make us more beautiful. They add to the story of who we are, and what we’ve overcome to become what we are.”

Brekka traces the golden vein of the repair on the teacup.

I crouch down in front of her. “Brekka, you were broken in that accident, physically on T10, and metaphorically in that the landscape of your life shifted seismically. The change in your goals and dreams broke your spirit, and being limited to a chair and unable to ski as you once did destroyed your plans. Being unable to walk and run and dance wounded you deeply. I’ve seen the pain of that break, and the repercussions that have reverberated through your life. But I’ve also seen the strength deep inside of you that allowed you to heal, to repair that break, and to strengthen the rest of yourself, your mind, your body, your heart, so that you are whole. You aren’t broken anymore, and in that I was correct when I yelled at Trig, but even I almost meant to hide the break. I thought you were like me. You’d glued yourself back together and Trig should stop making reference to the breakage.”

I take her hand in mine. “I missed part of your incandescence too. You’re more beautiful for your history and your rewrite of your future. You’re kintsugi, in every sense of the word. I love everything about your break, and the healing you did to address it. I promise that every single year, I’ll find something, some unique gift to give you. Something that’s more beautiful for an inconsistency, or for having overcome something. And we’ll put it in this table together. In that way, this table is my promise. We’re better together, and together we can celebrate the twists and turns that lie before us in this life, no matter what they are. Together.”

“But there are two things in the table,” Brekka says.

The other thing is a blue box.

“That’s true.” I pick up the blue box. “Trig assured me I had to find this at Tiffany’s.”

Brekka’s hand flies to her mouth.

“But when I went to look for gems, nothing looked quite right. They swam in front of my eyes, if I’m being honest. I went down row after row. The jeweler showed me perfect sparkly rock after perfect sparkly rock. None of them looked special enough for you.”

I open the box, and she reaches for it. I shake my head. “Uh uh, not yet. I’m not quite done.”

She smirks.

“What do you know about inclusions in diamonds?” I ask.

“Nothing,” she says. “Just that Mom and Dad won’t buy one if it has any. That’s about it.”

“Typical,” I say. “But I did some research. Inclusions sounds like a good word. It sounds like something you’d want, and maybe that’s meant to be a marketing tool. Technically, they’re flaws, yes, but they don’t always make something less beautiful. It took the jeweler at Tiffany’s weeks, but he found this for me.” I reach inside the box and pull out the ring. It’s a simple solitaire in a platinum band. It cost me every dime of my liquid savings, but I think it was worth it. Plus, once I hear back from Tate, I think I’ll be more than replenished. Even after taxes.

“This is a large diamond, weighing in at five and a half carats. It’s a brilliant cut. But it’s not flawless, because right in the center is something called a knot inclusion. But instead of being dark or cloudy, the inclusion on this is colored golden. It looks like a rose to me.”

I hand it to her and she looks at the stone carefully.

“It’s something that’s technically a flaw, but if that doesn’t look the same color as your eyes, I’m blind. And it looks like a flower. That gem won’t sparkle as much as some of the others, but if there’s another stone with that kind of hidden value, I won’t ever find it.”

“I hope you got a discount,” Brekka says.

“I did,” he says. “In fact, the only way someone like me could ever afford a five and a half carat, otherwise flawless diamond like that, is that the people of the earth around me are morons and they fail to see its true value. They don’t know that it’s worth a billion times what the normal, boring, sparkly diamonds are worth. They undervalue it, like you’ve undervalued yourself. But I’m here to tell you that I’m a delighted man to find two such bargains in my lifetime.”

Brekka beams at me.

I drop down to one knee and take her hands in mine. “And I’m not on one knee to be eye level with you this time, or not only for that. I’m kneeling down in front of you, my unique, breath stealing Brekka, my fire filled little dragon, to ask you if you’ll marry me. Will you be my kintsugi, my beautifully broken and expertly repaired wife?”

She leaps toward me, her arms circling my neck. “I like that nickname even more than goose. And yes, I’ll marry you, you big ox. But only if you beg me to move to Atlanta first.”

“Please, please, please,” I beg. “Uproot your life, your company, and your home. Anger your parents and move to Atlanta, Georgia to live with me forever and ever.”

“Yes, oh yes, I will.” She kisses me until I believe her.