had to cut through the line on their way to the escalator, drawing a surprisingly huffy response from a man in a plaid short-sleeved shirt who must have thought they were trying to usurp his position. Most of the people in line were nerdy-looking men, though Dave did notice a sprinkling of obese women and a number of people in wheelchairs, some of them severely disabled. It made sense, now that he thought about it, that Star Trek, and especially Scotty, might hold a special appeal for people who found themselves at odds with their own bodies.
They stepped onto the escalator and began their slow, effortless ascent. Julie gazed down at the Trekkies and shook her head.
“It's sad,” she whispered.
“What?”
“That,” she said, gesturing at the lower level. “All of it.”
Dave didn't answer. He had never cared for Star Trek and wouldn't have wanted to spend the better part of a beautiful Saturday stuck inside the mall, but he'd stood on enough lines for concert tickets in all kinds of weather—sometimes even camping out for really important shows—to feel an instinctive sympathy for the people below. They didn't seem particularly sad or strange to him. They were just waiting for Scotty.
“With diamonds,” Kevin explained, “you got four basic variables to consider. You got size, you got cut, you got color, and you got clarity. Within each of these categories, you got separate variables to consider.”
Kevin was a pixieish man in a brown suit, maybe forty years old, with curly gray hair slicked back behind his ears and an orangey tan whose origins could probably be traced to somewhere other than New Jersey. Dave made an effort to look fascinated as he droned on about point size, empire cuts, and the alphabetical grading scale for color, but his mind had already begun to wander. He almost wished he were downstairs, standing in line. At least then he'd have something to look at besides pale pink walls, diamond rings, and Kevin's tropical explosion of a necktie.
“The range is enormous,” Kevin said, in response to a question from Julie. “The vast majority of diamonds aren't even precious stones per se. They're used for industrial purposes.”
Kevin paused for a reaction, so Dave dutifully pretended to be impressed by this information, though he really didn't give a shit about it one way or the other. The whole concept of engagement rings struck him as an enormous scam perpetrated by the jewelry industry to force you into making the single most expensive useless purchase of your entire lifetime just to avoid looking like a cheapskate to your future wife, her family, friends, and co-workers.
“But let's face it,” Kevin said, finally bringing his filibuster to a close, “unless you have a lot of money to spend, most of what I just told you isn't going to be directly relevant to your purchase. You're not going to be in the market for some flawless oval-cut diamond of exceptional luster. You'll be looking for a decent-quality round-cut stone, maybe in the H-I-J range.”
“What do you mean by a lot of money?” Julie asked.
This question appeared to cause Kevin a certain amount of difficulty. His face cycled through a number of contortions before settling into its default mode of enthusiastic sincerity.
“It's all relative, you know what I'm saying? I mean, you can get a ring like these here for four, five, maybe six hundred bucks.” He caressed the air above the left side of the display case; the rings below were sad-looking specimens with stones that resembled pumped-up grains of salt. His hand drifted to the other end of the case, where rocks the size of molars glittered smugly in elaborate settings. “Or you could spend upwards of five grand on one of these.”
“We're somewhere in the middle,” Julie told him.
Dave paid closer attention as Kevin removed individual rings from the case—insurance regulations didn't permit him to exhibit more than one at a time—and quoted prices in the range of fifteen hundred dollars. They had entered the store committed to paying no more than a thousand, but their threshold seemed to have risen in the meantime.
“I really like this one,” Julie said, referring to a round-cut sixty-pointer that would run in the neighborhood of sixteen hundred transferred to a plainer setting. “There's something about it.”
“That's a quality stone,” Kevin said quickly. “You have a really good eye.”
Julie spun her swivel chair to face Dave, the ring cupped like an offering in the palm of her hand, her expression a complicated blend of excitement and apology.
“What do you think?”
Dave took the ring and held it up to the light. The diamond was small but radiant, shooting off pinprick flares of brilliance.
“I know it's expensive,” she said. “Maybe we shouldn't rush into anything.”
He could've told her to hold off, to shop around and compare prices, but that would've just been prolonging the ordeal. She had found a ring she would be proud to show off to her friends, a ring that would reflect well on him as part of the union it symbolized. Compared to that, a few hundred dollars didn't seem worth quibbling over, even if it meant he'd have to kiss good-bye any hope of buying the vintage Telecaster he'd been eyeing over at Riccio's Music.
“Get it,” he told her.
“Really?” She seemed almost disappointed by the ease of his surrender. “You mean it?”
She started to smile, but something happened to her face before she got there. She made a sudden gulping noise, and the next thing he knew she was sobbing against his face, her arms wrapped tightly around his neck. Pinned against his chair, Dave realized he was choked up as well. If making her happy were so easy, why had he gone out of his way to disappoint her for so long? Why had they wasted all those years?
“Oh, sweetie,” she said. “It's so beautiful.”
“Jules.” His fist closed around the ring as he rubbed his knuckles up and down the back of her neck.
“Congratulations.” Kevin reached across the display case to give him a friendly squeeze on the shoulder. “You made an excellent choice.”
“So tell me,” Kevin said, making salesman's small talk as he wrote up their order, “how long have you two been going out?”
Dave groaned to himself. This wasn't a subject he felt comfortable discussing with strangers.
“A long time,” he said.
“How long is long?”
He shot a quick warning glance at Julie, but it was too late.
“Fifteen years,” she said.
Kevin looked up from the paperwork, smirking like a guy who appreciated a little good-natured kidding around.
“Come on,” he said.
“It's true,” Julie insisted. “We've been going out since our sophomore year of high school.”
Kevin turned to Dave for confirmation, looking at him for the first time as though he were an actual human being, rather than a Visa card with legs.
“On and off,” Dave told him. “Fifteen years on and off.”
“That's
