The Proposal

by R. R. Banks

  The young man sat on the sidewalk with his back against the brick wall of the school and his knees pulled up to his chest. He was wearing black jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt that he had pulled down over his forehead, so I could barely see his face. His hands were clasped in front of him and I saw that he was wearing black fingerless gloves and the skin that was exposed looked dried as though chapped by the wind.

  "Shouldn't you be in class?" I asked.

  He didn't bother to look up at me, but I saw him shake his head slightly.

  "Maybe," he said. "But not here."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I should be in class at my old school."

  A realization suddenly hit me.

  "Jason? Jason Baxter?"

  He glanced up at me and I saw a distinct expression of disdain in his eyes.

  "Who wants to know?" He asked.

  People actually said that?

  "I do," I said. "I'm Ms. Martin. I'm your homeroom teacher and your History teacher. You haven't been in either class today."

  He scoffed and turned again to look back out over the parking lot.

  "I know."

  "Why haven't you?"

  "Because I didn't want to."

  "So, you decided instead that you were just going to come sit out here in the cold and stare out over a nearly empty parking lot?"

  He shrugged.

  "If you didn't want to be in class, why didn't you go somewhere? Why did you just sit here?"

  Was I seriously asking him why he hadn't run away from school? I think that qualifies as contributing to the delinquency of a minor and am fairly certain that that's frowned upon in teachers.

  "No car," he said. "Besides, I don't know where I am. I just moved here."

  I nodded.

  "I know. Come on, you need to come inside."

  "Why?"

  "Because it's still the middle of the school day and you're supposed to be in class."

  "I told you, I don't want to."

  "I don't really think that matters," I said. "Unless you've turned 18 recently, by law you have to be in school. You don't have the choice. And besides, three-quarters of the people in that building don't want to be here. If they have to be, you have to be. Come on."

  I was genuinely surprised when he let out a labored sigh and climbed to his feet. I was fairly certain that most of his motivation to go inside balanced on the cold temperature and quickly worsening wind, but I decided to take a little credit for it anyway. Maybe later in the year we would look back at this as the defining moment of our mutually beneficial student-teacher relationship. Or I had just rewritten my life as an inspirational Women's Network movie.

  As resistant as Jason had been when I found him outside, he became nothing short of defiant by the time we reached the office and I handed him over to Mr. Jefferson. I wasn't sure what the principal was going to do to handle the situation, but at this point, I was approximately thirty seconds away from the lunch bell ringing and I didn't want to risk my class sitting unsupervised in a classroom. I told Jason that I expected to see him the next day in homeroom and then hurried back to my classroom. The day had begun so optimistically, but now I felt suddenly drained and frustrated. My mood didn't improve through the afternoon and by the time the final bell rang, I was exhausted. I was walking down the main hallway toward the doors to the faculty parking lot when one of the other teachers scurried up to me.

  "Hey, Gwendolyn," she said.

  "Hi, Sarah," I said.

  "What's wrong?" she asked.

  "Just a long day," I said. "I think that the break kind of got the best of me."

  She nodded.

  "I know how that feels. But this is just your first year. You'll get used to it."

  "I hope so. I just want to go home, take off these shoes, and relax for a while."

  "Well, don't relax for too long, you don't want to forget to make the trifle."

  I looked at her strangely.

  "Trifle?" I asked.

  Sarah's eyes widened and I realized that I had forgotten something.

  "You have to make the trifle! That's supposed to be the centerpiece of the dessert table."

  Her near-panic told me that whatever it was that I had forgotten was important.

  "I'm sorry," I said. "What dessert table?"

  Her eyes widened even further, and I worried that they might pop out.

  "For the welcome party tonight! How can you have forgotten? We've been planning this for weeks."

  I suddenly remembered what she was talking about and I groaned.

  "Oh, that. I'm sorry, Sarah. I remember now."

  In all fairness, it had mostly been her that had been planning this party for the last several weeks. She had taken up the cause of welcoming the town's new fire chief and roped me into helping arrange for a celebration at the community center that evening. I had promised to make my signature trifle for the dessert table and should have started the day before. The fact that none of it was made yet meant that I was going to have no time to relax when I got home from work. Instead, I was going to have to head straight into the kitchen and hope that I could put it together fast enough.

  "Don't be late," Sara warned. "I need your help finishing the decorations."

  I nodded, wondering how I had gotten myself so involved in this. Then I remembered that it was part of my push for more socialization that had occurred right before my miserable New Year's Eve date. I chastised myself for my reaction as I walked out of the school and toward my car. I had been excited about the prospect of the party and looked forward to helping Sarah get ready for it when we first started talking about it. I knew that the way that I was acting right now was just a reaction to the rough start with my new student and feeling like my aspirations to be the best teacher that I could be were being threatened. Actually, the way I was acting right now was just plain obnoxious and if I wasn't me I probably wouldn't like myself very much. With that thought in mind, I got behind the wheel of my car, pulled down my rearview mirror, and stared at myself. I plastered on a smile and kept it there until I started to feel some of the funk lifting from me. It was definitely a fake-it-til-you-make-it-situation, but it was working, and I was going to go with it.

  The Reverend was waiting for me when I got back to the house and I took a few moments to cuddle with him and feed him a bowl of his favorite food before I got started on the trifle. He took a few mouthfuls and looked at me like he was forgiving me for my snippy mood recently. While the cake was baking, and the cream was chilling, I took a shower and then stood in front of my closet contemplating what I should wear to the party. I knew that it was just a community center gathering, but at the same time, it was an exciting evening for Silver Lake. The good old boy system had been alive and well for a long time in the town which meant that the fire department seemed largely like a hereditary monarchy. Things have gotten shook up in recent years, however, and with the welcoming of this new fire chief, it seemed that there might be a refreshing change coming. Besides, any time that there was some fresh blood in such a small town it was an exciting prospect, if for nothing more than the novelty of it all.

  I had managed to heed Sarah's warning, but only just barely, scooting into the community center with just minutes to spare before the time that I told her I would arrive. I was balancing the finished trifle in one hand and unbuttoning my jacket with the other when she rushed up to me.

  "Thank goodness! You finally made it!"

  "I'm not even late," I pointed out.

  "Well, things are going downhill fast. The balloons are the wrong color. The crepe paper isn't twisting properly. And the jello mold didn't set enough so now it's leaking all over the platter."

  I wasn't entirely sure what a tizzy was, but I felt fairly certain that if there was anyone who had ever had one, it was her. Sarah seemed absolutely at the edge and I reached out with my free hand to pat her on the shoulder.

  "It's going to be alright," I told her. "What color are the ballo
ons?"

  "Powder blue," she said.

  I looked at her strangely.

  "I thought that you wanted blue," I said.

  "Baby blue!" Sarah wailed.

  I patted her shoulder again.

  "I think it's going to be alright," I repeated. "As for the jello mold, didn't you say that you were making a fire truck?"

  "Yes," she said.

  "Then we'll just tell everybody that the hose is leaking."

  She didn't look completely convinced, but I didn't give her a chance to respond. I skirted around her and headed toward the dessert table where I deposited the trifle in the center. Then I turned and surveyed the rest of the room, trying to identify where I could be most helpful running interference between Sarah and the other people who might not know the level of perfectionist party planner crazy that was about to hit them.

  Chapter Five

  Garrett

  I looked into the large mirror hanging on the wall for what felt like the thousandth time that evening and ran my fingers back through my hair. I chastised myself for the nervousness that I was feeling and the fact that it had reduced me to essentially an anxious teenage boy getting ready for his first date. Of course, I hadn't felt that way when I actually was a teenage boy, but that seemed to make this even worse. I was usually completely sure of myself.

  In fact, I was downright cocky.

  Something about Silver Lake, though, seemed to take that confidence out of me and leave me questioning myself at every turn. I didn't like it and I could only hope that its influence would dissipate over time as I got more used to being back there and to the people. In order for that to happen, I was going to have to get through the event that night that was inspiring the anxiety and sense of dread that had settled into my belly.

  I checked my phone and realized that I only had a few minutes before I needed to leave if I was going to get to the community center in time for the party that was being held in my honor. I had heard of small towns rolling out the welcome wagon for new families, but I never thought it was an actual thing. Apparently, though, Silver Lake took this very seriously and was determined to make me feel as welcome as possible, while also giving me the grand tour of as many people from the town as was possible in one evening. It was that part that was making my palms sweat and my mind spin with what seemed like a never-ending series of worst-case scenarios. I knew in the logical part of my mind that I was being ridiculous at best and a massive pansy at worst. The chances that there was anyone still living in the town who was there when I lived there when I was younger were slim. Even if there were still people who lived here or family members of those people, I knew that they wouldn't recognize me. My last name wasn't the same that it had been when I lived here. That had been changed when my family shattered, and each individual shard was forced into a new existence. That would keep them from being able to judge me based on my family.

  Knowing that, though, didn't stop me from worrying about a showdown with elderly townsfolk wanting to run me out again. The importance of the role of fire chief in a small town like this didn't escape me, and I didn't want to do anything that might compromise my reputation before I even had a chance to build it.

  It was that same feeling that was motivating me to go to the party rather than concocting a mystery illness that would allow me to bow out of it gracefully. As much as I worried about the people of the town and how they might react if they knew who I had been, I also felt the distance between then and now. I knew that I wasn't the same person and was living a different life. I came to this community not feeling as though I was coming "back" or returning home, and I wanted to continue that. I wanted to meet the people and do as much as I could to become a part of them. For the first time in my life, I felt like I had the opportunity to really establish roots, and I wanted to make the most of it.

  Even if I thought there was a strong possibility that the majority of the town shutting down at nine might drive me to the brink of insanity.

  There was a part of me that felt like maybe I could make up for everything in my past. I knew that it wasn't my fault. I had nothing to do with it. Yet I still carried the stain of my family inside of me and sometimes when people looked at me I thought that they could see it. That had influenced me, molded me, and crafted me into the person I was. I had fought to make the most of myself and to let that influence be a good thing for me and for my son. Now I could make atonement.

  I leaned forward on the bathroom counter, pressing my hands down onto the cool marble and staring into my own eyes in the mirror in front of me. There were times, more often than I would like to admit when those eyes didn't even look like my own. Instead, they were my father's. They stared back at me with the same darkness and sent the same chill through my spine that they had that last night when I saw him. That was the night when those eyes turned to my mother and instead of just looking at her with disdain, they looked at her with hatred. I didn't know then that he shouldn't have been in the house that night. I didn't know that there was a piece of paper in my mother's bedroom that said he wasn't allowed to be near either of us. I didn't even know what a divorce was or that it meant that they were no longer together, and my father didn't live with us anymore. I had just figured that he was away for work or that he was visiting someone else over the last several weeks.

  That wasn't enough, though. Divorce wasn't enough. I knew that now better than I ever would have known it then.

  I would never really know what exactly had led him to look at her that way or what had built up inside of him to the point that he could wrap his fingers around the handle of the knife that was sitting on the kitchen table. Something must have happened that day to bring him to the house and to lock them in that confrontation, but no one ever told me. I didn't know if I wanted to know. Nothing could ever explain what he did. It didn't matter what he had gone through or what was happening between them. Nothing would ever make me believe that the fury in his eyes and the tightness of his grip on that knife were justified.

  Even now as an adult I wondered if I would be able to understand what was going through his mind or his heart in that moment. As a child, I certainly didn't understand. All I understood was terror. I should have run. I should have tried to get out of the house. Maybe if I had I would have been able to find help. Instead, I was paralyzed with a fear that was coursing through me. I couldn't move beyond the corner of the room where I sat on the carpet playing with my army men figurines. I tightened my hold on those toys in the same way that my father tightened his hold on the knife that was in his hand. I could still feel the hard, green plastic digging into my palms and fingers as I squeeze the men tighter and tighter. To this day I don't know if my father even knew that I was there. His focus was unbreakable. He was thinking of nothing but the blade and my mother's throat.

  I stayed right there where I had been sitting until the smell of the blood filled my lungs and my mother's screams deadened in my ears. They had ended, but they were never silenced. Even now I could still hear them. My father left the knife embedded in the carpet beside my mother and returned to the kitchen. I didn't know what he was doing. I couldn't see him any longer. That was when I left. I ran for the phone that was in my parents’ bedroom, but there was nothing but a disheartening silence on the other end when I picked it up. It wasn't until I put it back in its cradle that I realized the wires had been torn from the wall. It was the same with the phone in the small office. By the time that I got back into the living room, the front door of the house was standing open and my father was no longer in the kitchen. I didn't bother to go for the phone there. If he was in that room that meant that the wires to the phone would be dangling in the same frayed condition as the other phones. I went back into the living room and my eyes fell on my mother. I didn't want to look at her that way, but it seemed that I couldn't keep my gaze away from her. I wanted to see her face. Instead, all I could see was the wound in her throat. There was fraying there, too, and for many years after I wa
sn't able to look at the wires of a phone without my stomach turning and tears stinging the back of my eyes.

  I ran out of the front door of the house that day, not knowing that I would never step foot in it again. Instead, I ran down the street, afraid that at any moment my father was going to be there in front of me. I didn't know where he was. I didn't know then that he had gone into the kitchen to get more knives. I didn't know that he had gone to the next-door neighbor's house. I didn't know that the screams I was hearing in my mind weren't reverberations of my mother's voice. I was still holding onto my army men when I got to the police station. Maybe that was why they didn't seem to believe me when I first told them what I had seen. They thought that it was my imagination, that it was part of the game that was playing out through the little plastic figures gripped so tightly in my young hands. Finally, someone noticed the footprints that my shoes had left across the floor of the lobby. It glistened with the blood that I had picked up crossing the living room to the front door.

  I squeezed my eyes closed, tightening my grip on the bathroom counter and trying to count.

  1... 2... 3... 4... 5... 6... 7... 8... 9... 10

  I tried to focus, to pull myself out of those bitter, painful memories and thoughts. I drew myself inward, dragging my consciousness away from the edges of my mind where those memories lurked and forcing them to think only of the numbers I kept repeating.