Declan had a plan. This should have been the first warning sign, because Declan always has a plan, and the plan always has one critical load-bearing assumption that he has simply decided is true.
This time the assumption was that the pasta supper after the Covered Bridges Half Marathon was open to anyone. "It's communal," he said, with the confidence of a man who had googled nothing. "That's literally what communal means. It's for the community." We were standing in the Woodstock Inn parking lot at 5:45 p.m. on a Saturday, and it was still eighty-three degrees, and he had just said the word communal twice in thirty seconds, which is never a good sign.
I want to be clear that I had not signed up for a half marathon. I had signed up for the farmers market and possibly a lavender lemonade. Somewhere between the market closing and dinner becoming a question, Declan had decided we were going to the pasta supper, and I had said "I don't think we can just go to the pasta supper" and he had said "of course we can, it's Vermont" as if that were a policy.
We found the supper. It was in a church hall. It was full of people who had, in fact, just run thirteen point one miles, which you could tell because they were all wearing those foil heat blankets and looking at Declan and me — in our normal, non-athletic, un-foiled outfits — with a specific expression that I would describe as politely confused.
Declan was undeterred. He picked up two plates. He got in line. He was explaining to me, in a low, reasonable voice, that technically we had also exerted ourselves today because we had walked from the car, which was, he pointed out, pretty far. "We did the bridge," he said, as if completing the covered bridge on foot constituted a parallel athletic achievement.
A volunteer with a clipboard looked at us. She looked at the clipboard. She looked at us again.
"Did you run today?" she asked.
Declan pointed at me. "She almost signed up," he said.
I have replayed this moment many times since. Almost signed up. Almost. He offered almost to a woman with a clipboard as a credential.
She let us through, which I think says something beautiful about Vermont, or possibly just about Declan's face, which is the kind of face that reads as too sincere to be scheming even when he absolutely is. We ate pasta with about three hundred people in mylar blankets. Declan had seconds. He found a man named Gary who had done the half marathon nine times and spent twenty minutes asking him about his splits, which is a running word Declan learned approximately forty minutes prior. Gary seemed delighted.
On the way back to the car, the air had finally softened into the kind of June evening that makes you forgive everything — the temperature down into the seventies, the Green still glowing, music drifting over from somewhere by the river. Declan had a small container of leftover garlic bread that someone had pressed on him, because of course they had.
"See," he said, "communal."
"You told her I almost signed up," I said.
"That was true. You did almost. You considered it for a second at the market."
"I considered whether the sign was pretty."
"Right," he said. "You engaged with the sign. That's the first step."
I took a piece of the garlic bread because it was genuinely excellent garlic bread and the evening was genuinely excellent and Declan was walking next to me looking pleased with himself in that specific way he has, like a golden retriever who has just figured out how to open a cabinet and is waiting to see if you're going to be mad about it.
I'm not going to be mad about it. I am, however, logging this for the record.
Next year he wants to do the actual race. I told him he should probably train. He said he thought the pasta supper would be motivation enough. I said that is not how running works. He said he thought it kind of was, actually, and took out his phone to look up if there was a 5K he could "ease into," and I watched him squint at the screen in the last of the evening light and thought: here we go, and also, I would not change one single thing.