Not every proposal ends with happily ever after
Helping Hand
Smooth Thinking Week
Grace stood by the kitchen window, vacantly watching the singing snowbirds and humming ‘It Had To Be You.’ She splashed the boiling water over the edge of the tea cups without blinking. Most days even a trickle down the cup side would have her dabbing a paper towel in the saucer to clean the spill.
Maureen leaned back in her chair and jabbed a finger in Grace’s direction. “You hooked up with someone.” A noteworthy accomplishment for a woman in her fifties whose entire VHS library was comprised of movies recorded from the Hallmark Network or starring Doris Day. A woman who thought a man holding the door was being “overly familiar.”
“A Facebook friend?” Maureen hedged. She could never have imagined the reveal.
“A wonderful man. Fabulously wealthy. Bakare Tunde, whose brother is the first Nigerian astronaut to reach the moon.” She turned on her toe like an arthritic ballerina, stumbled across the aging tiles and dropped into her chair with one hand over her breast. “And he wants to marry me.”
Grace’s VHS library was comprised of movies recorded from the Hallmark Network or starring Doris Day. She thought a man holding the door was being “overly familiar.”
Maureen’s words collided in her throat like a six-way train wreck in Grand Central Station. She covered her mouth with her fingers until the mass jumbled mass of concerns dissolved and a cough broke free. “Please tell me you didn’t give him any money.”
Grace looked to the ceiling with the innocence she played as a child when their mother caught her sorting through the broken shards of the cookie jar for one last edible crumb. “Of course not. I loaned it to him to give him access to my account so he could save his brother. He’s been trapped on the space station for thirty years, and evidently International Law requires the payment to come from a U.S. account. “
She rose to collect the tea, wrapping the bags around a spoon to wring them dry. “As soon as the Nigerian bank processes my funds to prove the account’s legitimate, they’ll send the three million for his brother, and that’s when he’ll marry me.”
The Nigerian bank processed the money in January of last year. Every morning since, Grace has texted Maureen, “Any day now.”
Gone, and hopefully forgotten.
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Wry noir author Phillip T. Stephens wrote Cigerets, Guns & Beer, Raising Hell, the Indie Book Award winning Seeing Jesus, and the children’s book parody Furious George. Follow him at Phillip T Stephens.
