* * *
As the kids marched out of her room, Mary Beth smiled because she could return her thoughts to Tom, who she loved and knew more than anything she wanted to marry. All day, her friends kept asking if Tom popped the question yet. Tom’s mom kept calling to see if he had done it yet. They all knew he was going to ask. After his mysterious trip down to Boston to solve his “case,” they all knew he had gone and bought the ring. She even knew where he bought the ring, but she didn’t go so far as to find out which one. It was funny, she always knew that Tom was the one. Or, at least, ever since they had started dating and had figured out that they were just about perfect for one another, she knew he was the one. Even when he wasn’t Sheriff Tom and just Tom the really talented artist, she knew they would get married. When he ran for sheriff, she thought it was good for a laugh and even played along with his mother that it would help him grow up. To be honest, she didn’t care. She loved his comics, gory as they were, and thought it would have been great traveling around to the conventions with him. They were so much fun and she loved meeting all the crazy cool people and going to the events. They went to the big one in San Diego. She was so excited to go to San Diego. It was so beautiful there and even though she was scared to death of earthquakes, she had the best time because as much as she loved Stansbury and Vermont, she loved the beach more and told Tom at the time that they should just stay there and live in a tent on the beach, but he didn’t much like the idea of living in a tent on the beach and said that sooner or later California was going to get swallowed up by the Pacific and wouldn’t it just be better if they visited the conventions every once and awhile and she said okay. When they were at the big one in San Diego, she met all these writers and artists. She didn’t know there were girls who wrote and drew comics, but she met a couple and they were so cool and one of them sold her a purse that she made out of her favorite books. Mary Beth loved that purse and she loved Tom for taking her to meet all of these cool people and she knew that she was going to marry Tom no matter what he did.
When Tom became Sheriff Tom, Mary Beth was happy for him, but didn’t want it to be a lifetime thing. She just hoped he would have some fun with it and then get back to the comics. And he did seem to have some fun with it and, sometimes, it seemed to get to him and he took it really seriously, which she guessed he should given that he was sheriff of Stansbury and everything. After a little while, it did seem to go to his head a little and he started talking about how he could be sheriff for a long time if he wanted because the people of the town were really starting to take to him. Mary Beth was pretty sure that most of his reasoning for wanting to be sheriff for a long time was to cheese off Deputy Steve. Deputy Steve was a dick and deserved nothing and Mary Beth just wished Tom would fire him, but Tom kept saying it was so much more fun to send him off to write up reports about cow tippings and such. Sometimes she liked to go out and take pictures of Deputy Steve when he was “on duty.” He was such a dick and he didn’t realize that he made this dick face when he didn’t know people were watching. When he knew people were watching, he would plaster on this weird fake smile that everyone had always known was weird and fake and when he wasn’t around, people felt generally better. Mary Beth stopped visiting Tom at work when Steve was around because it was so hard for her not to tell him off and she knew if she told him off, he’d write her up on some weird charge that Tom would just have to make go away the way he made most of Steve’s tickets go away. That seemed to be most of Tom’s job, but he didn’t mind it. He told her it gave him a lot of pleasure undermining the work of Deputy Steve.
Mary Beth asked him if he wanted this to be his career, being a lawman. He kind of hemmed and hawed and finally said that it was what he thought that she wanted him to be, a man with a real job who would give their family a future. She knew that was his mother talking and had gone to talk to his mother about the ideas she was putting into her son’s head. Danielle was a great lady and would make a great mother-in-law. Mary Beth loved her and she loved Mary Beth. But Mary Beth loved Tom more and wanted Tom to be happy more than she wanted Danielle to be happy with Tom’s life. She and Danielle had even fought about Tom a little bit. Danielle loved to see her son growing up and loved that he and Mary Beth were finally going to get married and she gave credit to Tom being sheriff, which she thought was wonderful and could lead to bigger and better political offices. It took awhile for Mary Beth to shatter that dream of Danielle’s, though. Mary Beth didn’t want to be the governor’s wife. She didn’t want to be the sheriff’s wife and worry about her husband getting shot by some weirdo or Deputy Steve. She wanted to marry Tom the brilliant artist and go around to conventions and raise beautiful creative children who would love their grandma as much as she loved them. Mary Beth worked long and hard to make Danielle see Tom through her eyes and realize that he would be so much happier not being Danielle’s vision of a grown up and just being Mary Beth’s beautiful Tom. Danielle and Mary Beth cried for a while because they realized how much they both loved Tom and, really, each other. Danielle made Mary Beth promise to keep Tom happy and if that meant him not being sheriff, that was okay with her.
Mary Beth waited in her classroom and she knew that today would be one of the happiest days of her life and Tom’s life. She was going to say yes to his proposal because he was coming to see her to propose to her with the ring that he spent so much time trying to find for her because he wanted it to be perfect. Then she was going to tell him to quit being Sheriff Tom and she was going to give him the ticket to the upcoming convention in San Diego that she bought for him to match her own and they were going to go and meet cool people and he would maybe get a job working for one of them and then they would be the cool people too. More than anything, though, they would both be happy because they were living their own lives. The people of Stansbury could find themselves a new sheriff to care for them. They never really wanted Tom anyway. Not in the way that she wanted him.
Mary Beth smiled and started writing tomorrow’s lessons on the white board in her classroom while she waited.
Lakebridge: Spring (Supernatural Horror Literary Fiction) Page 24
