The Honeymoon Proposal

He opened his mouth.

“Matt, say ‘I see’ one more time, and there will be no more coffee for you in this kitchen.”

He looked at her in surprise, and then he smiled. His smile shot a flash of almost forgotten heat through her and she looked down into her coffee mug, trying to break the spell.

The doorbell rang, and she was grateful to escape. At the door, her grandmother’s three bridge partners clustered on the top steps, and somehow the three five-foot-tall ladies managed between them to dwarf the tall elderly gentleman standing in the middle, looking rather shell-shocked.

“Anna, Rose, Nora,” she acknowledged and stepped back. The old ladies filtered in, kissing her cheeks and chattering in a chorus. They visited her grandmother almost daily, and the laughter that filled the house during their visit, was probably better for Esther than all the doctors and medications in the world.

“Harlan Carlson,” the man said, holding out a hand and smiling. He looked very distinguished with his silver hair and a neatly trimmed white beard, but not familiar. “I’m an old friend of your grandmother’s. You must be little Joanna. We met many years ago, but you were very young, so you probably don’t remember me.”

Jo tried to place him, but with no luck. Her grandmother had so many old friends. “I’m afraid I don’t,” she replied apologetically, looking at the three ladies who were busy creating a mountain of outer garments after having piled their shopping bags in an equally impressive pile. Apparently they’d arrived directly from an extended visit to the mall. “But it’s always a pleasure to meet my grandmother’s friends, Mr. Carlson. Are you a new addition to the bridge club?”

His face creased in a hearty chuckle. “I don’t think so. Esther called me a few days ago—I’m very much looking forward to seeing her again.”

Joanna nodded, and beckoned him to follow as the three ladies filtered in a row toward Esther’s room, talking loudly amongst themselves. Matt came out of the kitchen, shook hands with Mr. Carlson and was affectionately attacked by the three ladies. They followed the horde to her grandmother’s room.

Esther was sitting up, almost bouncing at the sight of her friends filling the room. The air resounded with smacking kisses and fuss as everybody got comfortable at their usual stations. Mr. Carlson waited while the ladies got their greetings over with, and Matt leaned against the windowsill, his expression giving away nothing.

“Grandma?” Jo stood up on tiptoe and waved a hand to get her grandmother’s attention over the crowd at her bedside. “Harlan Carlson is here to see you.” She beckoned Mr. Carlson to step closer.

Grandma smiled and waved at him. “Harlan! It’s been forever, hasn’t it? I see your hair is turning white, just like mine.”

“I’ll bring up some coffee for your friends, Grandma,” Jo said, and turned to leave the room.

“No—wait a minute, Joanna. It’s because of you that I got Harlan here.”

Jo turned around and squirmed between Nora and Rose to her grandmother’s bedside, waiting for her grandmother’s explanation. She was pretty sure this had something to do with dying. Was Mr. Carlson here to draw up a will, perhaps? She suppressed a sigh and a twinge of fear. “What do you mean?”

Grandma looked up at her, pleading in her eyes. “Harlan is a retired judge. He can marry you and Matt.”

“What?”

“Please, Jo. Get married. Now. I know Matt will agree if you do. Harlan can marry you now.” She reached up and stroked Jo’s cheek. “You could be Mrs. Bentley in one hour, love.”

Jo felt her insides heave. The silence in the room was deafening; even the bridge trio held their breath. “Grandma—you called for a judge, so he could marry me and Matt—here and now?”

An almost imperceptible nod, the look on the lined face a blend of guile and hope. “Harlan retired a while ago, but he can still perform weddings. Of course we don’t have the paperwork, but…he’s an old friend—I called in a favor.”

Mr. Carlson—Justice Carlson—cleared his throat. “This is very unusual,” he said, looking between her and Matt. “I probably wouldn’t be doing this for anyone except Esther, but I understand…” He hesitated, then shook his head. “Well, there is considerable urgency. You don’t have a license, so you have to realize this is not a legal ceremony. You’ll have to do this again officially, with the proper paperwork in order.”

Jo felt tears teeter at the corner of her eye. She blinked them away. This was funny, she told herself. She’d tell her friends about this next week, and they’d have a good laugh. “Grandma—I can’t believe this! What happened to ‘sleep on it’?”

“I was speaking rhetorically. You’ve had time to think about it.”

“Grandma, please. Don’t do this. It’s not right. Don’t try to control our lives. Don’t do this to us. I don’t want to disappoint you, and neither does Matt, but we can’t do something this drastic just because you want us to. Please, don’t do this.”

Esther squeezed her hands together. “Forgive me, Joanna, but I must meddle. It means so much to me to see you marry Matt before I leave.”

“Justice Carlson just said, it wouldn’t be legal, Grandma.”

The old lady waved away her objections. “Harlan can marry you now—to me that’ll be just as valid as any other wedding. Then you’ll just do it all over again with the paperwork and rice later. The important thing is that you make the commitment to each other, that you say the vows. That’s all that matters. There’s time enough for the petty details later. Time that I don’t have,” she added with a sigh.

“But it’s not…”

Grandma didn’t let her interrupt. “I know. You want a proposal from your man, not an old lady ordering him to marry you. But things are urgent now.” She lifted a finger at Joanna and managed to wave it around without moving her hand. “I bet you would rather that I boss you around now than that I haunt you in the afterlife, wouldn’t you?” She grinned, a lively spark in her eyes that belied a woman on her deathbed. “I haven’t seen your grandfather in twenty-two years. We’ll have better things to do than chase after you, rattling our chains.”

Esther’s friends cackled, and Joanna couldn’t help but smile, even as tears continued to well in her eyes. This woman had been everything to her, a substitute for the parents that had never been there. “Don’t worry about me, Grandma. I’ll be fine. I don’t need Matt to look after me, any more than he needs someone to look after him.”

“Oh, he does, love. It’s not just him who has to do all the work. You need to look after Matt for me. That’s why I need you two to get married.” A trembling hand reached out for the glass of water on the nightstand. “I’m afraid I don’t have much energy. I think I need to rest soon again.” A long time passed as she brought the glass to her mouth, drank, and put the glass back down. She was so weak now, Joanna thought in anguish. Just a couple of months ago she was walking the dogs by herself, and now she had to struggle for a drink of water.

“Tell me children, will you do this for me, let me see you get married before I die?” There was a desperation in her voice, hope in her eyes that cut Joanna to the quick. She covered her face with her hands for a minute, then dropped them, dejected. She took a deep breath. Matt was standing silently by the window, arms crossed as he stared out into the evening darkness. No help there.

There was no choice, was there? She’d have to tell her the truth, hoping she could put it gently enough, hoping her grandmother would understand, wouldn’t be too disappointed, wouldn’t grieve too much for a future her granddaughter and godson would not share. She leaned forward and patted Esther’s hand. “Grandma…You don’t understand…There’s something you should know…” She looked at Matt, pleading for assistance, but his profile was hard and distant. She sighed and looked back at her grandmother. “Grandma…We’re not…”

Grandma waved a hand, dismissing her concerns. “I know. The two of you haven’t been together very long. But I don’t have time. It would mean everything to me to see you safely together—and it’s so obvious that you belong together.”

Oh, God. How could she explain this? “It’s not…”

“Jo, could we speak outside for a moment?” Matt had turned around and was nodding toward the door. “We’ll be back in just a few minutes, Esther.”

Esther smiled. “Take your time. I know my request is a shock…” She gestured weakly. “It would just mean so much to me. Discuss it. I’ll just chat with the girls and Harlan while you’re talking. Take all the time you need. We have all evening.”

All evening. Terrific.

Matt strode to the kitchen, his steps long and fast, and he was already pouring more coffee into their mugs when Joanna reached the door.

He grabbed the mugs in one hand, sugar and milk in the other and flung himself into a kitchen chair, banging the two mugs on the table hard enough to splatter coffee on the wooden surface. He motioned her to sit down opposite him, and she reluctantly did so.

“She’s bluffing, Jo. You’ve got to know she’s trying to manipulate us.”

“Of course she’s trying to manipulate us! She wants us married before she dies, and she’s not above using emotional blackmail.”

“Are you sure things are that serious? She’s looking well…” He shook his head. “I find it hard to believe she’s really that sick.”

“You haven’t been here, Matt. You haven’t watched her deteriorate. You didn’t move her things to the downstairs bedroom because she could no longer master the stairs, you haven’t been here to see her stop getting dressed in the morning.”

“Have you called in a specialist to look at her?”

Jo shook her head. “You know how she is with doctors. It’s good old Dr. Harrier or nobody.”

“She could be lying to us.”

“Lying?” He was dismissing her, dismissing her fears for Grandma, dismissing the old woman’s frail health, and his callousness infuriated her. “How can you say that? Why would she lie to us about something so serious? Just to get us married, when she thinks we’re heading that way anyway? If you’re thinking about confronting her with that suspicion, forget it! She doesn’t deserve being called a liar, just because it’s convenient for you!”

Matt stared at her for a long moment, then looked down into his coffee. There was silence in the kitchen for a long time before he spoke again. “Okay. I’m sorry. You know the situation better than I do. I didn’t mean to sound so harsh, but she seems fine to me—and we both know how she likes to meddle. But I suppose it’s just wishful thinking on my part that she’s actually faking.” He took a deep breath. “Fine. We assume she’s telling the truth. The way I see it, we have three choices. One—we can tell her we broke up. She’ll be pretty devastated. Two—we can stick to our guns and tell her we’re not ready to get married. The same there, she won’t like it, and she may try to make us feel guilty, but she’ll accept it sooner or later.”

Neither option sounded appealing. “And the third?” she prompted, hoping Matt had come up with a magic solution that would fix everything.

“We can do what she wants and get married.”

Joanna opened her mouth to reply, and shock started a coughing fit instead. It didn’t subside until after she had taken long gulps of the glass of water Matt pressed into her hand to replace the coffee mug.

“Bad joke, Matt. Really bad one,” she mumbled when she could speak again.

“It’s probably the safest solution if you’re worried about the shock to her health.”

“What next? She’ll ask us to have triplets, and we run straight to the fertility clinic?”

Matt stopped stirring his coffee and sent her a penetrating glance. “Jo, if you’re right, and she really is dying, we’re not going to get to do her any more favors, are we?”

Jo stopped breathing for a moment. It was one thing to listen to her grandmother’s proclamation of imminent death—she was used to that by now, although it hurt every time. It was something else entirely to have Matt say those words. “She can’t die…” was all she could stutter.

Matt shook his head. “We can’t know, Jo, we can only hope she’ll be fine. But you’re right, we owe her. If she really is sick and we can make her last days happy by pretending to get married, I’d say it’s worth it.”

“Pretending to get married? Are you suggesting we lie to an old woman on her deathbed?”

Matt shrugged impatiently, the simple gesture making her feel she was being unreasonable. “Does it matter? If I have a choice between lying to her or making her last days miserable, I’ll go with the lie. What harm could it do?”

“I can’t lie to her like that. I can’t. And it would be too complicated. She’d want to attend the wedding.” She shook her head. “And don’t even say it. I’m not going through with a fake wedding.”

“Jo, she knows a wedding here and now won’t be a real, legal one. She brought her friend here without warning—she knows we don’t have a license. She doesn’t care about the legalities, for her it’s the ‘I do’ in front of each other and witnesses that matters.” He shook his head. “I’m not sure how she got a judge to agree to this, but Esther’s always been good at manipulating people, hasn’t she?”

Joanna stared at him, almost unable to believe he was really suggesting this. The idea was preposterous. It was out of the question.

She was still working on getting over Matt. Marrying him wouldn’t help the healing process.

Yet, it was the easiest way out of this mess. Her grandmother would be happy, and there wasn’t anything lost, was there? It was just one ceremony, some pretending. It wasn’t as if this would be a real marriage.

Matt tilted the half-empty mug and pushed it back and forth on the table, his dark eyes weary. “Well? Shall we do it?”

He sounded as if he had just offered to have his head cut off. He wasn’t any happier about this than she was, but that was beside the point. He was willing to make this sacrifice for Esther. Of course she was too.

Without realizing, her mind had been made up. She nodded. “Okay. I’ll do it.”

Matt nodded, his expression grim now. She stood up and occupied herself with making a fresh pot of coffee. Matt poured the remains of the old coffee into his mug, and she remembered how he didn’t really mind—didn’t really notice—whether coffee was scalding hot or tepid.

More memories from the compost heap. She didn’t want to remember him and his coffee, or how he smiled when seeing her after a long separation, or how he kissed her absently when thinking about something else. Or the wrinkle that appeared between his eyes when he was talking on the phone, or the way he didn’t get around to getting his hair cut until three weeks after it was beginning to irritate him.

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