“Last night Roy asked me to marry him.”
Neil slowly sat back down. Roy Xavier was the automobile salesman she’d been dating for quite a while, but Neil hadn’t gotten the impression she was serious about the guy. “What was your answer?”
“I sort of turned him down.”
“‘Sort of’?”
“I told him the truth. That I like him and enjoy his company on our dates, but I don’t think I’m in love with him.” She studied Neil’s face closely, an anxious frown cutting tiny lines between her eyebrows. “You seem relieved I didn’t say yes.”
“Your announcement took me by surprise,” he said, not comfortable with admitting that he was relieved. Neil didn’t understand himself why his gut reaction to the idea of her marrying Roy Xavier had been so strongly negative, other than the fact that nobody she’d ever dated had seemed good enough for her.
“I wasn’t prepared for him to propose,” she confided. “I stammered around, like an idiot. Thoughts were whirling around in my head. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, plus a part of my brain was ticking off Roy’s qualifications that would make him a good husband for me.” She used her fingers now to tick off those qualifications as she listed them for Neil. “He’s a good-hearted guy. He’s successful at his job. Most months he’s the top car salesman at the dealership. He’s a church going man. He’s from a large family. I haven’t been around his parents a lot, but I like them just fine, and he seems to like mine.” In her expressive way, Cara threw up her hands. “Why not marry Roy? That’s the question. Especially when I’ll be thirty years old my next birthday.”
“You said yourself you’re not in love with him. Not after dating him for what, six months?”
“Six and a half months actually.” She resumed her argument with Neil and with herself. “Maybe there are some people in the world who don’t ever fall head over heels in love. Maybe with those people, love grows gradually out of respect and affection. Romantic love doesn’t last anyway, right?”
“Cara, you’re trying to talk yourself into marrying Roy Xavier.”
“You think I’d be making a big mistake?”
Yes. Neil clamped his jaw closed to keep from speaking the definite reply that rose to his lips. “What I think doesn’t matter. It’s your life and your decision. But don’t feel pressured into marrying Roy or anybody else just because you’re tired of being single and would like to make your grandmother happy.”
“But you don’t dislike Roy?”
“I don’t know Roy well enough to like or dislike him. He seems like a nice enough guy,” Neil added, aware that he sounded grudging.
Cara held out her left hand and gazed wistfully at her bare ring finger. “He didn’t buy an engagement ring. He said we could go shopping together and pick one out.”
“So Roy hasn’t given up hope that you’ll say yes, I take it.”
“Oh, no. He was disappointed by my reaction to his proposal, naturally, but he’s willing to give me some time.” She placed her palms on the table and levered herself up. “Thanks, Neil, for listening to another segment in the Life of Cara soap opera. I feel better now, more able to cope. Talking to you about a problem always has that effect on me.”
Neil didn’t feel good at all about the outcome of the heart-to-heart talk they’d had. In fact, suddenly his mood was lousy.
“Boss, a sales rep is out here and wants to talk to you.” Peewee stuck his head in the doorway to speak to Neil. He named the muffler company the sales person was representing.
“Tell him I’ll be right out,” Neil said.
“Will do.” Peewee left.
Cara came around the table. “You go and talk to the rep. I’ll tidy up,” she said.
“You’re not the maid around here.”
Neil had made that point clear in an employees’ meeting recently. He’d posted a new sign, restating his father’s old rule that each person using the lounge was to clean up after himself or herself out of consideration for fellow employees. Cara hadn’t complained to Neil, but he’d noticed that she was taking it upon herself to clear the table and tidy up when her co-workers didn’t bother to pick up after themselves.
“Don’t be so doggoned self-sufficient,” she scolded him, slapping his hand lightly away as he reached for his empty beverage can. “I like to do something nice for you when I get the chance. It’s payback time.” Cara stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek, then gave him a shove toward the door.
“Thanks, Cara.”
“You’re welcome.”
With efficient movements, she crumpled up the butcher paper around the uneaten portion of the po’boy. He’d gotten down most of his three-quarters of the sandwich, much to Cara’s satisfaction. Now if he didn’t eat a square meal for supper, at least he’d had some nourishment today, she reflected.
Cara only wished she could do more than help Neil run his business and make sure that he ate right. She worried about him and her heart ached for him when she thought about all that he’d been through, losing his wife and child. They’d been killed in a terrible ten-automobile pile-up on a Memphis interstate. Lisa and three-year-old Chris, along with a dozen other people, had simply been unlucky enough to be on the highway at the wrong time.
Neil had been out of town, doing his job as a sales rep for a major manufacturer of automobile parts. Cara sensed that in low moments he might sometimes wish he’d perished with his family instead of having been spared their fate. But she thanked God for sparing him. She loved Neil every bit as much as she loved her four brothers, and, truth be told, she was closer to him than to Tony or Michael or Sal or Frankie.
Cara had been raised with the philosophy that everything happens for a reason, and all events figure into a divine plan that humans may not comprehend. It was impossible to understand why a wonderful guy like Neil would have such a horrible thing happen to him, but Cara couldn’t help but be glad for herself that he’d come back into her life three years ago when he quit his job and moved back here from Memphis, a thirty one-year-old widower.
Every day when she came to work she looked forward to seeing Neil. What was it he’d told her today about knowing when Mr. Right came along? An empty can in either hand, Cara paused on her way over to the recyclables bin, recalling Neil’s exact words: When you imagine living the rest of your life without him, you won’t be able to stand the thought.
What she couldn’t imagine was ever wanting to work at a different job with another boss besides Neil. Whether or not she married Roy, Cara would keep her job. She would continue to see Neil every day. Their relationship wouldn’t change.
With the lounge restored to a spic-and-span state, Cara returned to the office and tackled her work with renewed energy. Somehow her ruminations about her stable job situation had eased a great deal of the anxiety of deciding whether to accept or reject Roy Xavier’s marriage proposal.
Chapter Two
“Thank you, Aunt Cara!” chorused four-year-old Lea and Lauren in unison. They’d just ripped open Cara’s birthday gifts, identical little-girl makeup kits. “Now we can put on makeup and look pretty, like you!”
Mia, the twins’ mother, feigned insult, arms akimbo. “Your mommy puts on makeup once in a while and looks pretty, too, when she has time.”
“It doesn’t do your Aunt Cara a lot of good to primp,” Cara’s oldest brother Tony addressed his young nieces, a wide grin on his face.
“Oh, no, here we go again,” groaned Cara, clapping her hands over her ears.
Tony