She put the house on the market again. As she stood there with the broker and a woman who was thinking of buying the house, the woman asked, “Are we allowed to paint over the mural?”
Sharri was hurt by the question. The mural was special to her. She thought the room was beautiful. She didn’t understand why somebody would want to paint over it.
The broker said, “You can do whatever you want if you buy the house.”
Sharri pulled the house off the market again. She kept living in the home she had bought with Joe, but her life, and the way she led it, had been split into two parts: One ended the morning of September 11, 2001, and one began September 12.
Before 9/11, she felt no connection to death; after 9/12, she felt permanently tethered to it. Before 9/11, relatives died, and she felt sad but still slightly removed from the devastation. After 9/12, she would hear stories about strangers dying and think, That could be me.
Before the attacks, Sharri was the woman who flew by herself to Japan, planning to live there for a while, assuming most Japanese people spoke passable English. They did not, but she enjoyed the experience anyway. She joined her husband on a work trip to Hong Kong, honeymooned in Italy, and lived in an emotional bubble, casually convinced that nothing bad would happen to her.
Starting on September 12, Sharri didn’t even want to go from Long Island into New York City because she didn’t want to be too far from Devon. She had lost one of the loves of her life and was terrified of not being there for the other.
Sharri was in a much more complicated emotional place than I was. She and Joe had dated for four years, and been married for three. She knew what it meant to be in a meaningful, life-affirming relationship. It wasn’t like her marriage had ended in divorce and left her hoping for a fresh start. She was in no rush.
When she broke up with me, I was stunned. I had ended all those relationships for tiny reasons, and now I was losing another one over basically a drawer that she interpreted to mean more. I was devastated. I wondered why this was not working, what happened now, what I did now. Or what I didn’t do. Whatever it was, I couldn’t figure it out. I had a lot of questions, no answers.
I didn’t call Sharri for three days, which was hard. I am someone who makes his living on the phone, who’s on the phone all the time, with all sorts of people. I wanted Sharri in my life, badly, but still, I didn’t call. I had been convinced—as hard as it was for me—that I needed to back off. It took everything within me to hold off from reaching out to her, to try to change her mind, to ask her for another chance.
I was restless. I had numbers of other women to call, so I began to mull over who I might have to call next if Sharri would not take me back.
But then, three days later, Sharri called and said three words that left me relieved and overjoyed.
“I miss you.”
8
We started dating again, but I was still unsure if Sharri would break up with me again. And I was starting to get a fuller sense of what it meant to be a 9/11 widow. One day, soon after Sharri and I started dating, I reached out to Jon Frankel, who is a reporter for HBO’s Real Sports. I called him because his wife, Erin, lost her husband, Greg, on 9/11. Greg Richards attended the University of Michigan at the same time I did and actually was one of my college fraternity brothers in Sigma Alpha Mu. He was younger than I was, but I remember him from our time together in the fraternity house. After he graduated, Greg worked for Cantor Fitzgerald and continued to work there, like Joe, until his death.
When I called Jon, I just wanted to see if there was some kind of magical formula that he would give to me that would help me along in this relationship, because I really wanted to make it work.
Jon was like me: He had a personal rule, before he met Erin, that he would not date anybody who had been married or had children. But also like me, he had been through some dating travails. Erin told him during their first phone call that she was a 9/11 widow, for the same reason Sharri told me right away: She knew that was a deal-breaker for some people. But Jon wasn’t deterred. Nine months later, they got married.
I asked Jon if there was anything I should know about being with a 9/11 widow. He talked about being supportive and understanding. He did not say anything that really surprised me, but it was good to hear it from him. I’m a reporter—even if I know something is true, it’s always comforting to hear somebody else confirm it.
When September 11, 2006, rolled around, I gave a lot of thought to how to handle it. It was the five-year anniversary of Joe’s death. I knew it would be a painful day for Sharri, but this was still new territory for me.
When you are a 9/11 widow, everybody knows when it’s the anniversary of your spouse’s death. It’s all over the news every year, especially in New York. And everybody seems to personalize it: I remember where I was when the first plane hit. It’s natural, but it adds extra layers of difficulty to being a 9/11 widow.
I wasn’t sure exactly how I was supposed to handle this. I sent Sharri a long email the night of September 10, hoping to hit the right tone. I wanted to convey how much I was thinking of her, and how hard I knew the day must be. I put a lot of thought into it. She sent me back one line, an indication of where her mind was at such a difficult time. I sent her flowers.
It was my first 9/11 since I had moved back to New York City, and I was struck by how different it was. The rest of the country knows that it is 9/11, but New York City feels it. I walked to my gym in Manhattan, and the streets seemed almost silent. It was so eerie.
As I lifted weights, I heard audio of somebody reading the names of all the people who had been murdered just five miles away. I hit the treadmill and then went home. I called the florist to make sure the flowers were being delivered, and I was told they were on their way. That afternoon, I got an email from Sharri:
I LOVE MY FLOWERS! They are beautiful and they are just what I needed. I have a big grin on my face. Adding some levity to a tough day.
It affirmed that I had done the right thing, because at times like those, it’s sometimes tough to figure out exactly what the right thing is. But the day was not over—on Long Island, Sharri was still trying to make her way through the day. Flowers and a nice email were not going to get her through it. I talked to her at around 6:00 P.M., and she seemed to be off in another world. It was the shortest conversation I could remember us having.
* * *
Romance can be easy. Relationships are hard. They require more complex chemistry. Many people wonder how they are supposed to know if they have met the person they are supposed to marry.
The first time that Joe’s cousin Little Joe met Sharri, he heard Joe say that a girl they knew “got fat.” Sharri snapped at him, “If you ever call a girl fat again in front of me, we’re done.”
And Little Joe thought, Joe is going to marry her.
Little Joe had seen enough of his cousin’s girlfriends to know how most of them would react. They would say nothing, or they would eat salads for the next thirty meals so they could lose weight to impress Joe. They knew there were more women lining up to be with him. Sharri wasn’t worried about that. She stood toe to toe with Joe. And Little Joe thought that, deep down, that was what Joe wanted. Joe Maio could have been a player, but he was a relationship guy—his friends all knew it, and he never tried to hide it. He wanted to be with a woman who respected herself.
Sharri and Joe broke up three times before they got engaged. They were in their twenties, still figuring out the requirements of permanent coexistence. Joe worked hard at it.
I was thirty-nine when I met Sharri. She had just turned thirty-seven. I don’t think there is a right amount of time to date somebody before you commit. You have to do it until you’re sure. I know people who dated for a week, got married, and are happily married twenty years later. And I know people who dated for five years, got married, and were divorced within a year. I think, no matter who it is, no matter how long you date, it’s always a leap of faith. People change over time;
they just do.
Sharri did not want somebody to wait on her hand and foot. She wanted somebody with some confidence. That’s why, I learned later, when she broke up with me, not calling for three days was one of the best moves I had made. Sharri had seen my desperation and thought I was too eager to please. She saw that as a sign of weakness. When I didn’t call, she thought, Oh, he’s not a pushover.
One reason Sharri was attracted to Joe was that he was ambitious. She liked that quality. To her, ambition did not mean that he made a lot of money or had an impressive-sounding job. She liked men who wanted something and went after it hard—whatever it was. It reminded her of her father, Chuck, a longtime Merrill Lynch employee who helped invent the original squawk box.
I’d like to think I have some of those same qualities that Joe and Chuck did. I am a workaholic by nature. It torpedoed a few of my previous relationships, but Sharri showed that she was drawn to ambition.
Within a few weeks of us getting back together, I felt very strongly that this was the right person for me. This wasn’t just “I have a feeling about this.” This was “I know. We’ve spent a lot of time together, and I know.” Everything just flowed. Life was easier with each other than it was without each other.
I wanted to marry Sharri. I was ready to live together, but Sharri didn’t want to live together unless we were engaged. She was extremely careful about dating with Devon around. She didn’t want a man being around her house all the time if it wasn’t serious. That added some urgency, but it was welcome urgency for me. I wanted to get engaged, too.
Before long, our engagement seemed inevitable. I heard her bring it up and talk about when we would get engaged, and I knew how decisive Sharri was. When she made up her mind, she would follow through; nothing was going to change her mind. We had a running joke. Sharri would say, “I want a ring big enough that I could eat off of.” It was just her way of teasing me.
* * *
That December, I had to be in Pittsburgh for a Thursday night Browns-Steelers game on the NFL Network. I had done the sideline reporting for the NFL Network for the first Thursday night games it aired, with Bryant Gumbel as the play-by-play man and Cris Collinsworth as the analyst. I loved working with those guys and that Thursday night team. But the logistics surrounding it weren’t always so pleasant.
Here is an example: The morning after the Browns-Steelers game, after not getting back to the hotel until about 1:00 or so in the morning, I woke up the next morning at 4:30 feeling the way most people feel when they have to wake up at 4:30 A.M. I checked out of my hotel and went outside, where it was dark and twenty degrees out. I had a flight to catch and a milestone moment ahead.
I had ordered the engagement ring, and the jeweler had told me the day before that it was ready. I was ready, too. I was still calling her “Maio,” still referring to her as Maio in my daily journals, but I was in love. Still, the weight of the moment was starting to register with me.
Less than seven months earlier, I had gone to a hospital, so worn out, physically and emotionally, that I was unable to use a toilet. I was devastated by my inability to find a partner. Now here I was, on a plane from Pittsburgh to New York, preparing to propose.
I had picked this weekend for a reason. My fortieth birthday was that month, and one thing Sharri loves to do is to throw a party. I don’t know anybody who does it better, from the food to the decorations to the entertainment. Sharri could be a party planner if she wanted. That’s how good she is at it. So she planned to throw a fortieth birthday party for me at her house that Saturday night.
Without her having any idea, I wanted to turn it into an engagement party.
The plane’s cabin was really cold—it felt like they had left it on the tarmac with the doors open all night. I fell asleep in my jacket. I woke up as we were circling New York. It was a bumpy flight, one of the worst I had been on in a long time. I started to feel physically ill.
We kept circling. I looked out and saw the World Trade Center.
Fitting, I thought.
And I said to myself, as documented in my journal entry that December day:
Joe, I’m going to be looking out for your family.
* * *
On the day Joe proposed to Sharri, he called his buddy Jeff Heitzner. “Can you meet me on the Upper West Side? I gotta talk to you.” Jeff met him in a bar. Joe pulled out a bouquet of flowers and an engagement ring.
“You’re getting married?” Jeff said. “That’s awesome.”
Joe was a bit nervous—not because he was worried he was making a mistake, and not because he was worried Sharri would say no. They had discussed getting married. The proposal would not come out of the blue. He was nervous just because this was one of those big milestone moments in life where even people like Joe Maio get a bit nervous. He wanted company. He had already brought the ring to Little Joe’s apartment to show him.
Joe asked Jeff to hop in a limousine with him. Jeff thought it was funny; Joe wanted a wingman up to the eleventh hour.
As I went to pick up the ring and then meet Sharri, I felt the same way Joe must have felt when he proposed. The combination of a bumpy flight and butterflies in my stomach left me frantic. I got to my apartment and quickly packed for my trip out to Long Island. My mom called and told me the best route to take; she knew where I was going, but she did not know what I planned to do when I got there.
I picked up the ring in the Diamond District in New York; I even had my cousin Randy Penn, who lived on the Upper West Side, come with me to inspect it. I wanted a woman to see it before I presented it to the woman I wanted to marry. When Randy saw it, she gasped. She loved it. I thanked her for the support and got in a taxi as I headed out to Sharri’s house. She came outside when I arrived, and I was so excited to see her that I wanted to propose right then and there, but I knew I had to wait. I had to hold back. I had a plan.
We went over to Devon’s school. I was his show-and-tell project for the day. I met the kids and recommended they eat their fruits and vegetables and talked to them about being everything they wanted to be. Sharri sat in the back, smiling.
That night, I sent Sharri out for a massage while I stayed home with Devon. He was six years old at the time. I had decided to take Sharri’s teasing about the size of the ring all the way to the end. I had purchased two rings: a really cheap one with a stone of cubic zirconia that was so small you could barely see it, and then the actual diamond.
On our drive home, I was so amused about my cubic zirconia plan that I actually started laughing out loud.
“What’s so funny?” Sharri asked.
“Uh … you crack me up,” I said.
Later that afternoon, while Sharri was out getting a massage, I had to rehearse everything with Devon, make sure he understood what was happening and the gravity of it. I showed Devon one of the rings.
“Are you going to marry my mom?” he asked.
“I’m hoping to,” I said.
We rehearsed his part so that he had it perfected by the time Sharri got home. And when she did, I approached her with a gift in hand.
“I have something to show you,” I said.
And with that, I gave her the cubic zirconia ring.
She looked at it, looked genuinely excited, and said, “Oh, I love it. I love it.” And she did, sincerely. Had that been the ring, she would have said yes and thought nothing more of it.
But then I had Devon walk out of the kitchen and into the lobby to serve up the real ring—on a big silver platter. On the platter, surrounding the wrapped box, was a fork and a knife, and Sharri looked at Devon and the platter, totally confused. Then she opened the box on the platter and had a similar reaction to the first, with more tears, more hugs, more kisses, more emotion.
The real ring wasn’t big enough for her to eat off of, which was what she’d requested, but she really didn’t care how big the ring was. She was just happy she had found her second husband.
* * *
My fortieth birthda
y party that night would turn into an accidental engagement party. People came for my birthday and wound up celebrating our engagement. Sharri had invited a bunch of my friends from Colorado, and it was fitting to have them there, because they had witnessed my dating follies up close. One friend who flew in was Rick Reilly, one of the greatest sportswriters ever—first with Sports Illustrated, then with ESPN. He was a guy I idolized. Rick lived in Colorado and was always so nice to me. I used to tell him if there was anything he ever needed, to call me. Then one day I was on vacation in Aspen and he called me.
He said, “Remember you said if I needed anything, you could help?”
I said, “Yeah.”
“Can I stay at your place?”
“Yeah. When do you want to stay here?”
“Can I be there tonight?”
He was in the process of getting divorced. I drove back from my vacation to let him into my house, to get him set up.
Now Rick was there for my engagement. He knew how badly I wanted to get married and have my own family. We had talked about it a lot. So he found this all hilarious: I moved to New York, and within a year, I had a wife, a six-year-old, and three dogs. He said it was like Sea-Monkeys, the old at-home hatching kit for brine shrimp. Instant family.
The party was fantastic. Food and candles were everywhere, everyone laughing, everyone having a great time. My family and friends were there, Sharri’s family and friends were there, and it was the first time our extended lives were all placed together. I remember thinking that if I had known how much happiness and fun everyone would have, how much joy and excitement I would feel, I would have proposed after six weeks of dating Sharri instead of six months. It felt that good and that right.
But before the party even began, we had one phone call to make.
Sharri called George Maio. I had gotten to know Paula and George a bit in the few months that I had been dating Sharri, and we got along really well. From the first time I met them—and I was more nervous to initially meet them than to meet Sharri’s parents—they could not have been any more welcoming or gracious to me. They treated me as if I were marrying one of their own children, which in a way, I was. George was pleased that Sharri had fallen in love again, and he saw that Devon and I were building our own strong relationship. He liked that, too.
The Man I Never Met Page 7