We Rejoin Our Heroes

 

About As Mushy As It Is Likely To Get

*O*

“I was wondering if I could talk you into marrying me. I mean not right this minute. Would you think about it?” he said, grinning.

“We could rule the county together!” he said! I laughed. What an idea!

I would have said I was shocked and surprised, but you know what? I wasn’t! Somehow, back channel, I knew what was up.

“Ok Doug,” I said. “Ok, I will give this serious consideration,” and had to laugh again. It felt like we were pretending, in a nice way, to be real adults.

*******************************************************

We were sitting there grinning when Lou and Elvin and Bubby came home. They had gotten the eggs. Lou put them in the fridge in their recycled egg carton. Elvin took a seat and looked around. He smiled a bit like he knew something. Always, a real bottom-line kinda guy. He looked like he was adding up a list of numbers and getting a kick out of the answer.

Bubby came to a halt. He looked at Doug. He looked at me. He said, “hey what have you two been up to? This room is full of a real weird vibe!” He sat on his haunches waiting, big pink tongue hanging out.

Doug said “I’m trying to talk Jen into marrying me. She is thinking it over.”

“Figures,” said Bubby.

Lou yelled “What, you idiots can’t get married! No! That’s stupid!” and burst into tears standing in front of the fridge. “Where will you live? You can’t leave!”

“Here we go again”, I thought. “Maybe the baby thinks she will be abandoned somehow.”

I shushed her and held her and patted her back until she quieted down, sitting perched on my knees like a little kid.

I said, “hey Lou, we all have to grow up sometime. We can’t just always be kids together. Things will change. It’s up to us to make the changes good ones.” She wouldn’t look at me yet, but she nodded and got off my lap and took a chair. She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her sweatshirt.

I smiled at my family and felt a great surge of happiness.

“Here we go,” I thought. “Oh boy,” I thought, “I want this." 

I stood up. I walked over to Doug. I said “I have given your offer serious consideration. I have decided to accept it. There is nothing wrong with it, and everything right with it!”

Doug stood up also. He said, “thank you for accepting my offer of marriage Jen!” We all, except Lou, laughed ourselves silly. It felt like playing. Lou rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. But she stayed in the room with us and that was a good sign with Lou.

Bubby seemed to think the whole thing was a lark. Have you ever seen a dog laugh? Well, they smile a lot, but laugh? I thought he was laughing.

Then there was some silly celebrating and we made dinner and didn’t get one other thing done that day. Lou and I went upstairs to bed and the guys, including Bubby, manned the front room.

Lou forgave me and we had a nice time yakking before sleep.

In the morning we all got together at the kitchen table again. We had to decide some things, such as who would perform this wedding and how much of a wedding it would be. I didn’t see a big fancy old fashioned wedding in our future really.

Doug said we should ask Roops, of course. Who else? Really there was no one else to ask. I thought a telephone would have been really handy about then, but no such luck. It was going to have to be in person, like everything else. I wondered if he would be happy, or what he would say. I wondered if the Lights would approve. I wondered if the Thumbies were still alive and would show up to cause trouble. I thought that they were probably still running around loose in Jerusalem hailing people with their particular greeting and trying to fix things.

We had to pick a date too.

This began to seem real.

There was a knock on the front door. We didn’t get many visitors, that was for sure. The last ones had been those Thumbie bros., weird double elbows and all! It was enough to make a person nervous.

I followed Doug out to the living room, followed by Bubby, who was not going to be left out of any further excitement. Doug gave me a quizzical look and opened the door.

Standing on the porch was Denise. She didn’t look happy. I wondered how she had found us.

“Can I come in,” she said. We moved back and said “of course.”

I said “what’s up Denise? Are you ok? Here, sit down.”

A little too thin, nervous and tired, she perched on the front edge of Dad’s old recliner.

“I thought you guys should know,” she said, “they’re going to close the store, I think.

“I heard that Doug was kind of the head man these days and I thought you all should know. I think that will be kind of a disaster for a lot of us. It takes time to grow gardens and raise chickens. Most of us live out of that pathetic store.”

We all sat down, slightly stunned. Doug said “this sounds like P-Sec is really losing their grip. I always wondered where they got the stock in the store anyhow. Do you know Denise?”

“Not in detail” she said. “Some of it comes from old warehouses I know, and some of it comes from a few suppliers that still operate here and there. I think P-Sec was paying them somehow. None of our stock is shipped from very far away, most of it is from relatively near by.

“But we haven’t gotten any new stuff for a few days, and they are acting strange up in the office. Today no one showed up, but one of them, who unlocked the doors and then left the store.”

Doug thanked her and told her that it was a very big deal and that we all needed to get serious about gardening, to try to feed ourselves. He was sorry that it had come to this. He said he would be thinking about the best approach and really appreciated the heads up.

Besides gardening and keeping chickens or rabbits or whatever, he thought we ought to mine some of the abandoned houses to see if there was still anything useful in them.

I got her a cup of instant coffee with some sugar stirred in and she rested for a few minutes. Denise said she lived not too much further down our road, which I didn’t know. Then she left to go home to her mom and baby.

“Oh great,” said Bubby. “Now where are we supposed to get dog food?”

“You’ll have to eat potatoes like us,” I said. He grunted and sat down.

Doug said “well we better pack up and go see Roops. We have a couple of things to talk about.”