It’s the Valentine’s gift I had handmade for my fiancé, Ryan. I unwrap the paper, slide open the box, and smile.
The polished wood square is pale and smooth, about the size and thickness of a credit card. It unfolds like an accordion, revealing three panels. In fine calligraphy is The List I made long ago. It’s all the attributes I wanted to find in the person I’d fall in love with. It’s my Ninety-Nine Things List, and Ryan checks off every one.
I’ve been told that most girls learn about love from their moms. But the summer I turned ten and my brother, David, was twelve, my mom was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She went fast, which everyone says is a mercy, but it isn’t. It just about killed my oncologist father that even he couldn’t save her.
My mom was a pharmacoepidemiologist on the board of the National Academy of Medicine. She used to fly all over the world, sharing stages with Melinda Gates and Tony Fauci, giving speeches on infectious diseases at the CDC and WHO. She was brilliant but also warm and funny. She could be tough, but she also knew how to make everyone feel special, seen.
She died on a Tuesday. It was raining out the hospital window, and her hand seemed smaller than mine. I held it as she razzed me for the last time.
“Just don’t be a dermatologist.”
(When you’re born into generations of doctors, you make jokes about imagined medical hierarchies.)
“I hear there’s good money in it,” I said. “And the hours.”
“Can’t beat the hours.” She smiled at me. Her eyes were the same blue as mine, everybody said. We used to have the same thick, straight brown hair, too, but in so many ways, my mom didn’t look like my mom anymore.
“Lanie?” Her voice had gone softer and yet more intense. “Promise me,” she said. “Promise to find someone you really, really love.”
My mother liked overachievers. And she seemed to be asking, with her final words, for me to overachieve in love. But how? When your mom dies and you are young, the worst part is that you know there’s all this stuff you’ll need to know, and now who’s going to teach you?
It wasn’t until college that I was introduced to the writer who would teach me about love: Noa Callaway.
One day after class, I came back to my dorm, and the tissues were flying on my roommate Dara’s side of the room where she and her friends were hunched together.
Dara held a half-eaten Toblerone out to me and waved a book in my direction. “Have you read this yet?”
I shook my head without glancing at the book, because Dara and I did not have the same reading tastes. I was pre-med like my brother and obsessing over my organic chemistry reader so I could move back to Atlanta and become a doctor like everyone else in my family. Dara was majoring in sociology, but her shelves were stuffed with paperbacks with cursive fonts.
“This book is the only thing that got Andrea over Todd,” she said.
I looked at Dara’s friend Andrea, who fell face-first into another girl’s lap.
“I’m crying because it’s so beautiful,” Andrea sobbed.
When Dara and her friends left in search of lattes, I felt the gold foil letters of the book’s title staring me down from across the room. I picked it up and held it in my hand.
Ninety-Nine Things I’m Going to Love About You by Noa Callaway.
I don’t know why, but the title made me think of my mother’s last words. Her plea that I find someone I really, really loved. Was she sending me a message over the transom?
I opened the book and started reading, and a funny thing happened: I couldn’t put it down.
Ninety-Nine Things is the story of Cara Kenna, a young woman struggling to survive a divorce. There’s a suicide attempt and a stint in a psych ward, but the tone is so brightly funny, I’d commit myself if it meant I could hang out with her.
In the hospital, Cara has only time to kill, and she does so by reading the ninety-nine romance novels in the psych ward library. At first, she’s cynical, but then, despite herself, she finds a line she likes. She writes it down. She says it aloud. Soon she’s writing down her favorite line from every book. By the day of her release, she has ninety-nine things to hope for in a future love affair.
I read the book in one sitting. I was buzzing all over. I looked at the chemistry homework I had to do and felt something inside me had changed.
Ninety-Nine Things held all the words I’d been looking for since my mother died. It spelled out how to really, really love. With humor, with heart, and with bravery. It made me want to find that love myself.
At the back of the book, where the author’s bio usually is, the publisher included three blank pages, lined and numbered from one to ninety-nine.
Okay, Mom, I’d thought, sitting down to get to work. I wasn’t sure which of Dara’s friends this book had belonged to, but it was now undeniably, cosmically mine.
The beauty of such a large list was that it allowed me to weave between weird and brave, between superficial and marrow-deep and deal-breaker serious. In between Enthusiastic about staying up all night discussing potential past lives and Answers the phone when his mother calls, I’d written: Doesn’t own clogs, unless he’s a chef or Dutch. At the very end, number ninety-nine, I wrote, Doesn’t die. I felt my mom was with me, between the lines of that list. I felt if I could pursue this kind of love, then she’d be proud of me, wherever she was.
I don’t know that I ever really thought I’d find a guy who embodied my whole list. It was more the exercise of committing to paper love’s wondrous possibilities.
But then . . . I met Ryan, and everything—well, all ninety-nine things—just clicked. He’s perfect for me. Scratch that. He’s perfect, period.
I fold up the wooden panels, tuck my gift back into the box. I can’t wait to give this to him tomorrow on Valentine’s Day.
My phone buzzes. A barrage of texts illuminates the screen. Two from Ryan, on his way up from D.C. He’s the legislative director for Virginia senator Marshall Ayers, and on alternate Fridays, their office closes early, so he takes the 1:13 train to New York.
The articles he’s texted—one review of a movie we both want to see, and one press piece for some legislation he’s been drafting about voters’ rights—are quickly shuffled to the bottom of my screen as my launch prep team blows me up.
The cake balloon crisis is still unfolding, and there are fifteen dramatic messages in the text thread to prove it. Two dozen balloons, at six dollars apiece, are missing from the order my assistant, Aude, picked up this morning. Calls to the bakery have been made. Refunds have been demanded.
At last, the message I’ve been waiting for appears. It’s Terry.
Stuck in traffic. Signed books in my possession. Stop freaking out.