Endurance

It's the summer of 2022. The air in Lincoln Park feels just a little bit lighter than the rest of Chicago. Maybe it’s the way the breeze carries the scent of cut grass over the brick paths, or the way the late-afternoon sunlight smears itself gold on everything west of the conservatory. The trees are older here, gnarled and content to watch the city surge and recede from a safe, leafy distance. Kids shriek in the playground by the pond. Somewhere, a group of fraternity alums are shouting over a bags game and half-warm IPAs, the yelps and the slaps of beanbags punctuating their debates over which Cubs team really should have gone all the way. The picnic lawns, as always, are dotted with blankets and bare knees and cheap wine. Summer lives in Lincoln Park.

Michael Lewis’s stride, even at a walk, still holds a runner’s rhythm. He knows the crisscrossed footpaths better than the grid of downtown—every slight rise, every hidden turn, every shady stretch beneath the old elms. Michael, a 35-year-old man with short brown hair, brown eyes, and athletic build, keeps one hand in his pocket, feeling the smooth edges of the velvet box thumbed nearly round by the nervous sweat of the last hour. Abby, a 31-year-old woman with shoulder-length blonde hair, blue eyes, and a slender build, walks beside him, a half-step behind but always catching up, as if she’s worried that he’ll vanish into the next crowd of dog-walkers and joggers.

“Are you even listening?” she asks, playful. Her eyes catch the sunlight, a sharp blue that would outshine the lake on a cloudless day. She looks almost severe in profile, until the smile breaks and she’s transformed again—Abby, the woman who can swing from deadpan to effervescent in a breath.

“I’m listening,” Michael says, and he is, mostly, but the nervousness is climbing up his throat, crawling behind his ears. “You were saying—”

“That your mom texted me to bring home more pan dulce,” Abby says. “But if we stop by the bakery, you’re getting the bill this time. You still owe me for the last doughnut run, remember?”

He chuckles, but she narrows her gaze, mock stern. “I’m serious, Lewis. Fair’s fair.”

They pass the fountain, low and broad, its lip worn smooth from decades of teenagers sitting on it after dark. The water is thin, barely more than a ripple, and the ducks seem embarrassed to be there. Beyond the fountain, the path doglegs toward a stand of oaks. Michael gently guides Abby that way, feeling the sweat bead at his temples.

“You good?” she says. “You’re walking like you’re heading to the gallows, not a picnic.”

“I’m fine,” he says. “Just—big day.”

She snorts. “Every Saturday is a big day to you. Some of us are just trying to survive 'til Monday.”

He slows at the wrought-iron bench, cast dark in the tree’s shadow. They stop. Abby looks at him, a question in her posture; she’s expecting a story, a confession, or maybe just a breather from the heat. He studies her: the way she pulls her hair off her neck with both hands, the faint sweat above her lip, the freckles climbing up her cheekbones.

He’d practiced this a hundred times. The proposal was never supposed to be a cliché—no scoreboard, no flash mob, no photogenic skyline. Michael had spent three years learning how Abby took her coffee, memorizing the weird sequence of steps she did before every run, listening to her talk about her family with both pride and a knife of pain when she thought he wasn’t listening. He’d learned what it meant to hurt, and to be hurt, and how love sometimes grows in the cracks left behind by other people’s mistakes.

He could picture how it would go, but now, here, the words stack up useless in his head. So, he sits, and she sits, and for a moment, they’re just two bodies cooling down in the shadow of a tree.

Abby is the first to break the silence. “If you’re about to tell me you’re joining a CrossFit box, I’ll throw you in the fountain,” she says. “I mean it. Those people are culty, Michael.”

He laughs. It’s too loud, too sudden, and he bites it back. “Nothing like that. I just—”

He stops. He looks past her to the playground, the merry-go-round spinning unevenly under a pack of little kids. Then he looks back, finds her eyes, and makes himself start over.

“Do you remember last summer?” he says.

She squints. “Which part?”

“All of it,” he says. “The blackout in my apartment building, the lake swim, that time you dragged me to the Korean spa and I almost passed out from the steam room. Every day was this—” He gestures around them. “This bright. The last three years with you were amazing, Abby. Even when we fought, I never wanted to leave.”

Abby goes quiet, her face unreadable. She’s never liked being the center of a moment, and now she’s hedging, waiting for a punchline.

“I guess what I’m trying to say is,” Michael goes on, “the best part of my life started when you made fun of my karaoke singing skills. And it keeps getting better, even when we screw up, even when I say or do something monumentally dumb, yet you're always there to support me. Like now.”

He pulls the box from his pocket. His hands are steady, finally. He opens it and the ring—a slim silver band, set with a modest aquamarine—catches a sunbeam like it’s meant for this minute.

Abby doesn’t speak. Her hand rises, trembling a little, covering her mouth. The wind rustles the leaves above them, and for a few seconds there’s only that sound, the dry applause of summer.

Michael kneels, because he knows Abby will want to tease him for it later, but right now it feels right. He stays there, looking up.

“Abby Beeks,” he says, and the name feels like a song, “will you marry me?”

She doesn’t breathe at first. Then she does, sharply, a gasp that teeters between laugh and sob. Her fingers press harder to her lips, and tears spark at the corners of her eyes, which make the blue almost electric.

He waits. He’s good at waiting. He’s waited for everything in his life to happen a little later than it was supposed to.

Abby lowers her hand, and there is a smile, huge and wild and not at all the cool, cynical grin she gives to everyone else. “Are you out of your mind?” she whispers. “Yes.”

He slips the ring onto her finger, feeling her pulse in the softest part of her wrist. She pulls him up by his shoulders and hugs him so hard he thinks his ribs might creak. He’s laughing and crying, and so is she, and when he finally manages to let go, the world has changed in a way so small and so colossal that he’s not sure how he’s supposed to walk through it.

A passing jogger whoops and claps; a couple with matching sunglasses on the next bench over start a slow, mocking applause. Abby flips them off, but she’s still smiling.

Michael looks at her, sees the future in a way he never has, and says, “So, bakery?”

She grins, wiping at her cheeks with the heel of her hand. “Pan dulce, now and forever.”

They walk on, Abby leaning into him, her hand tight in his, the ducks at the fountain watching as the world continues on like nothing remarkable has happened. Only Michael knows how wrong that is.