Chapter 65: A Jewel in the Sand

December 22, 1985

Puerto Rico

"Warm weather during the holidays is becoming an annual tradition," I said to Inez, a content smile on my face. The midday tropical sun was beating down on us as we made our way through the San Juan airport parking lot, toting our luggage. "That's one more amazing change in my life since I met you."

She favored me with a sweet smile, before replying, "This kind of weather around Christmas is pretty much all I've ever known."

"That goes for me, too, and I'm a lot older than my niece here," laughed Pedro Trujillo, who was carrying one of our suitcases in one hand, and a set of car keys in the other. Pedro, a pleasant, jovial man, was Javier's younger brother; he spoke English in surprisingly accent-free fashion. He'd been entrusted with picking us up at the airport. He popped open the trunk of his car, in went our bags, and moments later, we were out on the road.

We'd arrived in Puerto Rico a day ahead of Inez's parents. Javier, of course, had a business to run; he and Lupe would be coming in tomorrow. Today's destination, Pedro's residence, was over an hour away by car. He lived in a small, comfortable dwelling in the outskirts of Arecibo, a city on the island's north coast.

Inez was looking forward to spending time with her father's side of the family, something she rarely got to do. Unlike his wife, Javier had been the sole member of his immediate family to relocate to the mainland. Besides Pedro, there were two older brothers, both of whom lived near Arecibo. Both were married and had raised families. As for Pedro, he was divorced, with a fourteen-year-old daughter. Pedro shared custody of the girl with his ex.

Lupe, meanwhile, had no one on her side to touch base with in Puerto Rico. Her closest relatives were the Andrades in New Jersey and the Delgados in Florida. So, on the surface, this visit would be all about getting to know Javier's side of the family.

By the time we got settled in at Pedro's place, a good chunk of the afternoon had slipped by. Nonetheless, Inez had a suggestion. "Let me ask Tio Pedro if he minds driving us around a little more. I want to show you the house I lived in when I was a little girl. It's not very far from here."

Pedro was more than willing to get behind the wheel again, and off we went. After a drive of less than fifteen minutes, heading in the direction of the downtown area, we pulled up in front of a small, humble one-story dwelling with a fenced-in yard.

"I haven't set eyes on this place in years," said Inez wistfully. "I only have vague memories of living here, since we moved to Florida when I was five. But this was my first home." I squeezed her hand as she continued to gaze upon her childhood residence, now owned by an unknown party, with a girlishly reflective expression on her face.

We thanked Pedro profusely for his hospitality; he'd gone over and above the call of duty. I knew that Inez's parents would be renting a car upon their arrival the next day. Even so, I didn't want to rely on anyone else for transportation, and I made a mental note to look into renting our own car at the earliest convenience.

December 25, 1985

We made plans to stay at Pedro's place for the duration of our visit; his daughter would be spending the holidays with her mother, which left lots of space in the house for us to occupy. It goes without saying that we once again dealt with the challenge of sleeping in separate bedrooms. Javier and Lupe did in fact arrive the next day; they opted to stay less than ten minutes away, at the home of Javier's eldest brother, Rodrigo. Another brother, Luis (who was between Rodrigo and Javier, age-wise) lived just a short hop away.

On Christmas Day, everyone got together at the home of Rodrigo's oldest daughter, Carolina, who was in her late twenties. She and her husband, Carlos, were the proud parents of a two-month-old baby boy. Since Inez and her parents were seeing the baby for the first time, they spent more than a few minutes fussing over the infant.

Presents were exchanged, and a sumptuous feast was served up. Carolina and Carlos, it turned out, owned and operated a small but successful local restaurant, and they put the best of their culinary skills on display for all of us.

Rodrigo, I discovered, was every bit as much of a traditionalist as Raul Andrade. However, he lacked Raul's warm, gregarious nature, which smoothed over the rough edges and then some. "Tio Rod is wonderful," Inez assured me. "It takes some time to get to know him. He's not very expressive, but he has a big heart."

By contrast, Rodrigo's wife Leonora was chatty and unfailingly pleasant. She and her sister-in-law Marta (Luis' wife) sat with Inez and me for nearly an hour, as we shared our story with them. By now, I was quite comfortable in the company of Inez's relatives. I maintained a polite and respectful demeanor, and threw out as much Spanish as I knew, which earned me major points.

I also had the immense pleasure of meeting Isabel Trujillo, mother of Javier, and grandmother of my beloved. At eighty-three years of age, Isabel was still in reasonably good health. She lived in a segmented-off part of Rodrigo's house, still drove a car nearly every day, and came and went as she pleased. She spoke very limited English, which gave me a further opportunity to put to good use the Spanish I'd learned during my final year in college.

"You know, my parents wanted to name me after my grandmother," Inez told me during a quiet moment. "But Tita talked them out of it. She said that I should have my own identity. So, by way of compromise, they gave me a different name starting with the letter 'I.'"

All I could do was smile. "It's incredible how we've been together for more than two years, and I'm still learning new things about you."

December 26, 1985

Today, the day after Christmas, I took the first concrete steps toward transforming my vision into something real.

Looking back on it now, my plan was rather elaborate in some ways, and a lot could have gone wrong. However, something – perhaps the hand of Fate – seemed to take control, and everything just sort of fell into place.

Early that evening, Javier and Lupe swung by Pedro's house and picked us up, and we headed back to Carolina's place. Carlos was still at the restaurant, as he was most evenings, which left mother and baby holding down the fort at home. As a result, Carolina was grateful for the company. She had a very willing helper on hand; Inez was simply ga-ga over the little one, and soon was cradling the baby in her arms, making cooing noises. Carolina had to make a run to the store to pick up some diapers, and asked Inez to accompany her. The two of them soon headed out, taking the baby with them. That left Javier, Lupe and me sitting in the living room.

I realized that the time was now. I wouldn't get a better opportunity.

"I'm glad to have a chance to talk with you both privately," I began, speaking softly but firmly, as both Javier and Lupe looked at me with sudden curiosity. "There's something of great importance I need to ask you."

I saw them exchange a look of confusion, tinged with concern. "You can always ask us anything, Pat," Javier finally offered. "You know that."

I took a deep breath. Here went nothing.

"You know how much I love and respect you both. I know that tradition is important to you, and it is for me, also. What I want to ask you for is ... your permission." Still feeling them both out, I let that hang for a second.

"Our permission?" Javier asked, seemingly not following me at this point.

I nodded. "I'd like to ask your permission ahead of time ... before I ask your daughter to marry me."

Javier and Lupe regarded each other with a look of stunned silence. There were, however, traces of smiles on both of their faces, which gave me a small dose of encouragement. After a pause of several seconds, it was Lupe who finally spoke. Her words, at first blush, appeared to muddy the waters a little.

"Pat, we cannot give our permission because it is not ours to give. It's clear that you love Inez and she loves you," she told me.

I was confused for a moment until Javier explained.

"Pat, what my wife is saying is that we are not old-fashioned in the way of my brother Rod, or her brother-in-law Raul. We know that you not only love our daughter, but are the best thing for her. You can't have our permission, but we can give you our blessing and we do that with great joy and happiness."

"You are so good for each other, Pat. We are so happy for you both," said Lupe as she stood up, walked over and embraced me.

"Your daughter still has to say 'yes, '" I laughed sheepishly.

"True," deadpanned Javier, before trying to suppress a laugh of his own. At the same time, he offered me a manly hug and a handshake.

Lupe playfully reached over, whacked her husband gently on the arm, and then addressed a reply to me. "Like she would ever say 'no' to you about anything."

"See what you have in store, Pat? Latinas have a temper to be reckoned with," Javier laughed. Lupe just grinned and gave her husband an affectionate embrace. As for me, I just smiled. One very crucial step was in the rear view mirror. Now I just had to set the stage.

December 28, 1985

"Now that we're somewhere warm, let's go to the beach," I'd suggested to my sweetie the previous morning. "Do you know any good beaches in the area?" I had no doubt that she did.

"A few," she confirmed. "There's one that's my favorite, though. It's a little bit further away, but well worth the extra time. Let's plan on hitting that one."

Not wanting to bother anybody for transportation, and remembering my earlier vow to rent a car for us, I picked up the phone. But at that very moment, it began to rain. Hard. And it didn't let up until mid-afternoon, effectively washing away our plans for the day.

"The weather here can be unpredictable," a somewhat disappointed Inez commented. "But let's not get down about it. There's always tomorrow." And indeed, there was. Think big picture, I reminded myself. Don't get hung up on small details. Evie's words of wisdom had never rung truer than at that moment.

During the evening, we got together with Inez's parents. Somehow, Javier had gotten wind of my plans to rent a car.

"Why don't you two just use our rental car?" he offered. "We have no plans right now for tomorrow, and if anything comes up, we'll hitch a ride with someone else."

"Are you sure?" I asked him.

"It's not a problem. Really. Take our car, and enjoy the day." I got the vague impression that Javier had put two and two together, and figured out my intentions. If so, however, he never let on.

In the morning, Inez and I got started bright and early. I drove, and Inez served as the navigator; it was about a thirty-minute jaunt to the beach. It was a warm, blessedly dry day, with the sun well in evidence, only occasionally obscured by a stray fair-weather cloud.

I nodded inwardly upon viewing the beach that my girlfriend had directed us to. It had all the prerequisites I was looking for. It was quiet, although not completely devoid of humanity; a few fellow sun-bathers and swimmers lurked about, and any feelings of total seclusion were dispelled by sporadic passersby. Isolation was not my aim here; just ambience. At one end of the beach, a freshwater stream coming down from the mountains flowed directly into the ocean; this area was strewn with rather large rocks. The rest of the beach, however, was flat and sandy.

We spread a blanket on the sand. Without hesitation, a grinning Inez removed her T-shirt, fully revealing her bikini-clad body. I realized that she had made sure Javier never glimpsed it while we were getting ready. For me, it was the most beautiful female body I'd ever viewed, in either life. She positioned herself horizontally, face-down on the blanket. "I get dibs on being rubbed down with sunscreen," she giggled, her head turned to one side.

She doesn't know it, I thought, but she's playing right into my hands. One part of me felt nervous, but the more substantial portion of my being was calm and collected. I reached into our beach bag for the bottle of lotion; I'd been the one to pack it before we left. As I took the bottle out, I casually removed another small item as well. I deliberately concealed this motion from my sweetie. The object in question was an intact clam shell, both halves still connected to each other, off-white in color with a distinct orange stain on one side. It was, of course, the very shell I'd found during a similar beach excursion in the Florida Keys, at a much earlier point in our relationship. In the two years that had passed since then, I'd kept the shell in my possession, and taken great pains to protect it from harm.

I squeezed out a blob of sunscreen into my right hand, and began to work it into the back of my beloved as she lay prone on the blanket. With her thus distracted, I took the shell in my left hand, and gently placed it at a point in the sand just off the edge of the blanket, directly behind her head. This part of the plan having been executed to perfection, I continued to rub lotion all over her upper and lower back, as well as the back of her legs. She then flipped over for me, allowing me to complete my work on her front.

At that point, I laid down beside her. She returned the favor by applying a liberal quantity of lotion to my sunburn-prone skin. When finished, she assumed a supine position, her head tilted to one side, directly facing me. I gazed into her eyes, just savoring the manner in which her voluminous dark tresses framed that angelic face of hers.

She wanted to discuss mundane things at this point. "I barely remember it, of course, but Mami always tells me that we used to hang out on this beach a lot before we moved to Florida. Whenever we've come back here to PR for a visit, we always make it a point to come here at least once. That's why this place is special to me. It's a direct link to my early childhood, and I don't have too many of those."

Her sentimentality drew a smile from me. "I'm happy to finally have the chance to share this with you," I told her. Something in the tone of my voice must have seemed out of the ordinary, for she flashed a curious smile of her own, and appeared ready to ask me a question. However, something else appeared to enter her mind at that instant, for she opted to take the conversation in a somewhat different direction.

"One time," she related, "when I was about fifteen years old, I wanted to come here with Carolina, who must have been about twenty-one at the time. Naturally, I was at an age where I thought I knew everything." She paused to giggle, before continuing. "I had brought a two-piece bathing suit with me. You wouldn't call it a bikini, but it was a two-piece. When Carolina saw it, she freaked. 'You aren't gonna wear that, are you?' she screamed. 'My dad will flip out!' We ended up going out shopping for a more, um, modest piece of swimwear."

"You're lucky," I pointed out, "because your mom and dad aren't like that at all."

"They really aren't. And you know that I have no secrets with them, none at all. I can tell them anything." She hesitated for a moment, before going off on yet another tangent. My, was she ever chatty today. "I've been thinking about something else. We've talked about how in the other timeline, moving to New Jersey after my, um, troubles might not have been an option for me because of Tio Raul's old ways. I probably couldn't have come here, either, because of Tio Rod, and maybe Tio Luis, too."

I took subtle action to nudge the conversation back in an appropriate direction. "That other you," I said softly. "If I had another chance, I'd do my best to love her."

She reached over and pinched my cheek. "I know that she would have responded to that."

A momentary silence followed. "I'm getting kinda hungry," Inez declared. "What do you say we break out those sandwiches Mami packed for us?" With that, she got up on her knees and began rummaging through the beach bag. Suddenly, she appeared to take note of something in the sand, right next to the blanket. I saw her lean in to take a closer look, and then turn toward me, a look of disbelief on her face.

"That's – no, it can't be," she uttered, confusion evident in her face. Turning back toward the object in question, she reached down to pick it up. "Holy crap ... it looks exactly the same! How c-could... " she stammered. "Look, there's something inside... " At that point, she said no more, for the "something inside" had fallen out, right into the center of the palm of her hand.

It was, of course, an engagement ring; I'd purchased it from a jeweler back in New Jersey two weeks earlier. The moment was at hand. Taking both of her hands in mine, I rose to my feet. Realization began to sweep across her face; her eyes seemed to grow wider and rounder by the second. Spontaneously, I burst into song. "How can I convince you," I sang, the words seeming to rip free from my heart. "What you see is real... " I'd given a lot of thought as to what the appropriate song might be, and I'd settled on "The Search is Over", the same song I'd serenaded her with during the final Lightning in a Bottle show. There on the beach, a scant few miles away from her earliest childhood home, I gave a repeat rendition that might not have matched the original in vocal precision, but which carried a meaning far beyond anything that preceded it. I sang the first verse and the chorus, her rapidly moistening eyes gazing at me with a mixture of rapture, anticipation, and disbelief. Then, I slowly dropped down to my knees before her.

"For me, angel," I said, my voice firm but at the same time, not quite steady, "you are the love of two lifetimes. Will you marry me?"

Well, now she was beginning to cry in earnest; it took several seconds for her to choke out her answer. For me, those seconds seemed to drag on into eternity. Why the hesitation? I wondered with alarm. Does she have doubts? Is she going to turn me down? I grew more and more concerned. Finally, her gaze met mine; I must have been looking at her imploringly. "Oh, yes!" she squealed, instantly delivering me into a state of elated bliss. I rose up to my feet. "Yes, yes, yes, yes!" she repeated over and over, raining kisses all over my face. "Do you know how happy you've just made me?"

"No happier than you've made me," I smiled. The ring was still there, nestled in the palm of her hand. Taking it between my thumb and index finger, I gently slipped it onto her ring finger, stopping just before the last knuckle. She took it from there, and slipped it firmly into place. I gazed at it for a moment. Ever since I'd purchased the ring, I'd mentally tried to picture it on her finger. Now, here it was, fixed in its rightful place, the facets of its diamond throwing little specks of the tropical sun in every direction. It looked even better than I'd imagined.

"I love you, always and forever," I told her, before drawing her in for a kiss. The kiss lasted, and lasted, and lasted. And it might have lasted even longer, had a round of applause not burst forth, emanating from not too far away.

A group of five or six fellow beachgoers were in the vicinity. They'd figured out what had just transpired, and offered us sincere congratulations in both Spanish and English. An older Anglo couple, seemingly in their seventies, broke free from the group, and moved closer to greet us more personally.

"What a beautiful scene that was," said the man. "Congratulations to you both." Somewhat sheepishly, we both expressed our sincere and heartfelt thanks.

"We're here on vacation," offered the woman. "And you know what? This man here also proposed to me on the beach in North Carolina, a long time ago."

"We've been married fifty-two years," the man said. "Here's hoping the two of you make it that far."

"We have every intention of doing that," I replied, flashing a smile at Inez. We spoke with them for a few minutes, before they moved on.

"What a nice couple," said Inez dreamily. "So ... what now?" She gazed down at her left hand, spreading her fingers, as if she needed to visually convince herself that the ring was indeed there.

"Well, we'd better eat your mom's sandwiches," I cracked, and we both laughed. "But I think there's a group of people back at your uncle's place who really should be the first to hear the news."

So, we broke out the sandwiches, along with a bottle of soda, and partook in a quick lunch. "If I tried to smuggle along some champagne," I said with a wry smile, "you'd have figured everything out."

"Tell me something," said Inez, nibbling away at her sandwich. "What would you have done if I hadn't seen the shell lying there in the sand?"

"I had that angle covered," I grinned. "Believe me, somehow, I would have made sure you noticed it."

"There's another thing I need to know," she said, her voice getting softer. "You've had that shell for what, two years? What made you decide to keep it?"

I locked my eyes to hers, and managed to keep my voice steady as I said, "Because, even then, I figured we'd eventually get around to this point."

With that, the tears of joy returned, and the kiss which followed might just have outdone the one before it.

A little over an hour later, we arrived back at Rodrigo's place, trying to keep our smiles to ourselves. We discovered that although Carolina and Carlos were there, Inez's parents had not yet arrived. "I just spoke with them," Carolina assured us. "They were at Tio Luis' place, but now they're on their way over here."