Even though when he told me I wrenched it off my finger and pitched it at him so hard it stuck with a thock right into the cloth of his green down vest, he still said I should keep the ring.

"I want you to have it - it's yours," he mumbled hollowly, looking at me, then away, as he picked the thing from the vest very carefully, like it was a shard of glass in a wound.

I remember seeing some small pieces of feathers escape from the slit the point of the pear-shaped stone had made in the fabric. One bit of fluff stuck beneath a prong in the setting, and he extracted it quickly and rolled it between his fingers, then gently placed the ring on a stack of magazines on the coffee table.

Saying he would pray for me, he opened the front door and that was it.

I can say I was stunned, I can say I felt darkly empty. But I cannot say that I mourned - at least not just then. There was too much to do.

Because, my mother said, of what people might think, dozens of rules of etiquette would keep me busy for the next few months, right up to and through the day I was to have switched the engagement ring to my right hand during the ceremony, to allow my wedding band to take its rightful and permanent place on the base of the fourth finger of my left hand.

Because, my mother said, there was a chance she could get some of her deposits back if I acted quickly enough, there were telephone calls to make: to the hall and to the caterer and to the band and to the travel agent, plans cancelled and refunds politely granted without so much as a cluck of sympathy from the clerks and secretaries and representatives at the other end of the line - like this sort of nightmare was something they dealt with every day.

Because, my mother said, people had to be told, there were telephone calls to make and expressions of shock and grief to hear from uncles and aunts and cousins who had just arrived at the point where they actually believed someone would want to marry me, and had gone beyond that even to spend good money on new shoes to wear to the event.

Because, my mother said, now none of them were mine even though they had been given to me, there were gifts to return, and weeks to spend repacking and sending back what seemed like a hundred boxes. Ther must have been that many, because there were about that many ladies at my shower that day in the banquet room of Saint Casimir's Hall, where I sat beneath a painting of a smiling Pope John Paul II and tore open packages that held the vital ingredients of my new life.

With each serving spoon and dish towel and toaster tong I saw it materializing in the same detailed clarity and lush Technicolor in which I dream each night, and in the same posed perfection I had found on each and every one of the 802 pages of Today's Bride; I not only had bought the telephone book-size February - March issue but also eagerly had bought into its vision of the perfect marriage: each page of laughing, intense, communicating couples was one more tiny reinforcement of my suspicion and hope that, despite the silent and bland marriage I witnessed daily in my own home, love could be a joyous and living thing.

And these, emerging from their layers of tissue paper and nests of foam pieces, would be the finishing touches: a sterling candle extinguisher, so we would not spray wax onto our new cut-work linens when we blew out our color coordinated candles; sets of matching cornflower-patterned Corning Ware, for those make ahead dinners to be frozen for the days I would be late coming home from work; a bedside clock set into a square of crystal, to wake us on those many mornings we would oversleep after nights of passion that would start out with us wearing that matching pajama set - scarlet silk look top for me, scarlet silk look boxer shorts for him - the only thing in the haul that was remotely racy, but hot enough to make my mother redden and turn away in her seat at the head table and reach for the balled-up Kleenex that is always somewhere up her left sleeve.

There were accessories for the bathroom: shell-shaped white porcelain soap dishes and toothbrush holders, and a catchall for hairpins. There were glass vases to hold the flowers that would grow in our backyard garden. Heavy ceramic nested mixing bowls for the peanut butter cookies he would beg me to make. Rolls of film and a photo album for our honeymoon photographs. Trays and platters and sets of towels. And a picnic basket stocked with two plates, two sets of silverware, two white linen napkins, two fluted glasses, and a split of asti spumante. We would eat from that basket every night, I had imagined, dipping strawberries into cream, lounging on a blanket on the top of some hill, maybe in our matching pajamas, watching the sun set on one perfect day after another.

But there would be none of that now.

I was a woman who had been left for God.