by Amber Burns
“I’ll let you sleep this time,” I called over my shoulder.
With the weather turning, there were storms on an almost nightly basis now, and I watched the sheet lightning in the clouds overhead now. I was looking forward to spending time with Roy, he seemed nice. It would be good to have another person to talk to. I walked up the steps, and as I opened the door, Armand flew up my jeans and draped himself over my shoulder.
“Hey kitty, what have you been up to?”
I walked through to my pantry cupboard to fetch the bag of cash and took it to my bedroom. I needed to count it and sort it neatly. Also, it needed to be better presented than in a duffel bag, this just looked dodgy.
10
Roy took to being on the Mary Jane like a fish to water, and I fired up the motors, taking her just outside the lagoon. I was weary of the weather, and not keen to stray too far from safety. We anchored and cracked open a couple of cold beers once our lines were in the water.
“So Michel, what are your plans with my only daughter?” He said, leaning back against the rail.
Well that was unexpected.
“Funny thing Roy, that discussion is exactly the reason I brought you out here today.”
“Roy, I know Annabelle and I haven’t known each other for a very long time, but I fell in love with that girl even before I first spoke to her.”
When he frowned I continued.
“She walks along the beach every evening, and I used to watch her, I didn’t even know who she was. I called her mermaid. She always looks so sad staring out at the water. Anyway, the point to my bringing up the subject is, I want to marry her Roy, and my Uncle brought me up to have good manners, I want your blessing first. May I marry your daughter?”
There, I’d said it. The man’s eyes widened.
“You are aware of the situation with her ex?” He asked softly.
I nodded, “She did tell me a bit of it yes.” I knew it was going to be hard for him to trust someone with her again after that, probably as hard as it would be for her to trust a man again too. “Roy, I have no intention of hurting her, ever.”
He narrowed his eyes at me.
“You’re telling the truth, I can tell. But I can also tell you have a past, and I don’t want your past screw-ups to come back and bite my little girl in the rear okay?”
I felt like I was being scolded by a school teacher, he was serious about this, and I got it. I would be too if I had a daughter like Annabelle. Roy smiled at me then.
“I have her mother’s wedding and engagement rings still, and I know it would mean a lot to Anna to have them. I know you young people all want everything new, so this is not a demand, but if you would like it… I know it would mean so much to her if you gave them to her…” He trailed off and wiped at his face.
I smiled at him, “I would like to do that, very much.”
We started making our way slowly back to shore with nothing to show for our fishing efforts, but the most important discussion a man could ever have in his life was now out of my way. I walked Roy back to his house, and that very same day he handed me the small velvet ring box that contained Anna’s mother’s rings. Roy saw me to the door and just before I left he looked up at the sky.
“Hurricane season’s close,” he murmured and then waved me off and turned to go back inside.
His reminder about hurricane season put the fear of God in me, and I spent the next week readying my house to take a pounding. Armand followed me everywhere meowing loudly and rubbing against my ankles every time I stopped moving for long enough. My shutters were soon up, stairs onto the beach re-enforced, and the garage roof, which had been leaking, repaired. I stocked up with bottled water and enough food should anything serious happen, and made sure I had stuff for the little fur-body too.
I helped Annabelle with her house, and also got Roy’s shutters up. The physical work was good, and I soon lost the little paunch I had gained, my muscles growing strong again. Throughout this, Anna watched from the porch as I worked, thinking I did not catch her furtive glances. I fell in love with her cooking, and also showed her I had skills in the kitchen. She tutored her art classes, and also painted at home, her work getting sunnier and brighter as the days passed.
I had the perfect way to proposal planned out, and I was merely waiting for the right moment to do it, which arrived a few weeks later once all the holiday makers had once again left Crystal Beach. Peace was restored, and my plan formed as I stood on her porch after doing a few basic repairs one day. On this same day I had also happened to notice how close her house was to the beach, much more so than mine. The fact niggled at me with the storm season here, and the threat of hurricanes hanging over us, but I put those thoughts aside, thinking of happier things.
********************
Annabelle brushed the hair from her face and stood from where she had been curled up on the bed reading. She placed her book on the bed and stretched like a cat, as she was about to go and run a bath there was a knock on the door. She was not expecting anyone, and pulled a soft woolen jersey from the cupboard before heading down the stairs to cover up the thin vest she wore.
Annabelle was surprised to find Michel standing outside her door, a bunch of stargazer lilies in his hands. He was standing side-on to the door, and she took the opportunity to admire his build. He had gotten strong from manual work around the house, and she had watched him help with her father’s home as well as her own. She turned the doorknob and he jumped, nervously facing her.
“Hi,” Michel said, running a hand through his hair, which he had cut a bit shorter.
Annabelle narrowed her eyes at him, he was up to something.
“Hi yourself handsome,” she stretched up on her toes and kissed his cheek. “What’s up? We didn’t have plans tonight did we?”
He shook his head.
“No, but I was wondering if you’d come for a walk with me? Oh, and I’ve brought these for you, I thought you’d like them.”
“Sure, that would be really nice actually, I’ve been inside most of the afternoon.”
She took the flowers from him and placed them in a vase before deeply inhaling the intoxicating scent of the lilies.
“They are truly one of the loveliest flowers, are they not?” she whispered into the bunch.
When that was done, they left the house, and Annabelle turned her face to the sky as she took Michel’s hand when she stepped off the porch. The clouds lay in a thick bank to the South, almost touching the horizon, and black as night at this early hour.
“I think we are in for a mean storm,” Annabelle commented.
“I will keep you safe mermaid,” he chuckled next to her as they strolled along the hard sand at the water’s edge.
She breathed deeply the scent of the ocean as it mingled with the smell of his cologne where her head touched his shoulder. They were nearing his house when she caught sight of a bonfire on the sand.
“Michel, somebody made a fire near your house, look.”
She pointed to the flames. He lifted her hand to his lips to kiss her fingers.
“I built it before I came to get you, I put out some wine for us too,” he said, his mouth still against her hand.
When they got closer Annabelle saw the basket and champagne glasses, and two cushions on a blanket. She watched Michel turned to face her, reached into his pocket and brought out a small velvet-covered box and got down on one knee. She clapped her hands over her mouth when she recognized her mother’s ring box and shook her head.
“I don’t believe this is happening. Are you?”
She didn’t get to finish as he started speaking.
“Annabelle Smith, would you fulfill the cliché and make me the happiest man alive by agreeing to marry me? I promise to never leave you, where I go I’ll take you, or where you need to be I will follow. I’ll care for both you and your father, and I will do so in happy times or in sad.”
He said these things while looking her dead in the eye, and as
her father did, she knew he was telling the truth. Annabelle nodded.
“I will, yes.”
Michel jumped to his feet and grabbed her in his arms, swinging her in a circle around him, and as his lips met hers the first clap of thunder sounded in the distance and the entire beach was lit by blue-white lightning from end to end. Annabelle jumped in his arms and then giggled, and they parted so that Michel could reach into the ring box and take out the solitaire diamond that sat there on a yellow gold band.
“We can get a different one if you want, but your father thought this would have sentimental value to you.”
Tears had filled her eyes when she’d noticed it was really her mother’s ring, and she shook her head as these tears now ran down her cheeks in rivulets.
“This is perfect, I don’t want anything else.”
The first big raindrops started falling, and they were torn from their dreamy state. They both scattered to gather the cushions, blanket and basket, running for the porch of his house as the heavens opened. When they stood breathless under cover of the roof, with the goods on the ground around them, Michel pulled Annabelle into his arms.
“Kiss me fiancé.”
She did, she kissed him with an abandon she had not yet allowed herself to feel with him, and it felt good. Annabelle looked out at the beach when he released her, and uttered a sigh.
“I’m stranded here, this is not weather that’s going to let up anytime soon.”
They took the blanket and pillows inside, and Michel poured champagne that they took with them, and they sat out under the canopy of fairy lights to enjoy it while the weather raged.
11
I was woken from peaceful and deep sleep by the sound of the wind howling around the sides of the house, and when I sat up on the side of my bed after shifting Anna from my arms, I felt the house shake under my feet. She stirred in her sleep, and I moved off the bed to look out through the window, at which point a clap of thunder shook the house again, and Anna leapt up.
“Michel? Where are you?” She called in a panicky voice.
I reached for her in the dark and touched her hand.
“I’m right here Anna, stay where you are, I am going to close the storm shutters before this wind breaks the windows.”
I grabbed a pair of shoes and shoved my feet into them, and ran for the front door. The door nearly threw me off my feet when I unlatched it, and the rain lashed down sideways against me as I moved from window to window securing the steel shutters over them.
By the time I got back into the house I was drenched from the rain, and when I came stumbling up the stairs in the wind Anna stood waiting for me with a towel. Armand was crouched on the couch behind a pile of scatter cushions, his little eyes nervous. In a flash of lightning the ocean was lit up, and we both gasped at the size of the swells. For the first time we heard the waves crash into the sand a few meters away. Annabelle raised her hands to her face.
"My house and my dad! I need to know he is okay. He will be awake, but I need to phone him.”
She lunged for my landline, but I stopped her.
“No! Use my cellular, and phone on his too, no landlines. They are dangerous in storms.”
She phoned, and was relieved when he told her he had put his shutters up that afternoon already, seeing the storm building. He told her he had put the ground level ones on her house too, but had not been able to do the upper floor.
“Stay safe daddy.”
She hung up and placed the phone on the coffee table. I exhaled a big sigh, it was very dark in the house, and I moved around fetching candles and matches to place in strategic places along with flash-lights. I also turned on the small radio I found in the pantry cupboard, and that’s when we heard the warning siren sound effect:
“WARNING, WARNING, Hurricane activity currently in progress over the Northern Coastline. If you are in Crystal Beach and surrounds, batten down the hatches, extremely vulnerable properties are urged to evacuate, WARNING, WARNING.”
“Oh God, I didn’t have any idea, I haven’t been listening to the weather at all. Usually there is more than enough advance warning.”
Anna paced his lounge floor, picking Armand up to cuddle him.
“We’ll be okay Anna, we are safe here, and I was actually just thinking about the fact that your dad is sheltered by your house. So don’t worry, everything will be okay.”
It was two AM, and we fetched blankets and pillows, getting comfortable in the lounge, which was more central, and as far as I could tell, probably safer than the bedroom. We fell asleep snuggling on the couch with the lamp still on, but were woken cruelly when the entire house was shaken violently by the loudest thunderclap yet. The lights flickered for a moment, and then everything went black. I held Annabelle tightly, and we simply stayed as we were till morning.
**********************
By seven in the morning the storm shutters were still being shaken by the wind. There was no power, and water came in from the drenching rain outside. The wind drove the rain diagonally across the porch and in through the gap between the wood of the door and the floor. When they stood with their faces close to the glass to look at what was going on outside, they saw the waves crashing to the beach only four meters from the house.
With absolute horror, Michel looked out to the wild water.
“Anna, if the water is this high your house will be flooded. You are much closer to the beach,” he said softly.
She shook against him, and he saw tears on her cheeks when he looked down at her.
“Hush, anything can be fixed love,” he said this as he pulled her tightly to his side.
She placed her head down onto his shoulder.
“It’s the memories in the sentimental items that wash away that hurt, not the material things. A house is a house anywhere, but that house is my home, and it’s where I spent my mother’s last days with her.”
She walked over to the radio and checked it.
“This can work with batteries too, don’t you have any?”
Michel walked to the pantry cupboard with a flash-light and came back with two packs of the C-sized batteries, inserted them in the radio, and turned it on. There was not much new, excepting news of devastation in the Bay, boats destroyed and a shelter set up at the local school for people who needed to flee their homes.
“I’d clean forgotten about the Mary Jane,” Michel gasped.
She stroked his back, “Let’s deal with one thing at a time, can we focus on something happy?
Where do you want to get married?”
He smiled, pleasantly distracted.
“On that note... Hold on.”
He jumped up from where she had pulled him down next to her on the couch and disappeared into the bedroom, coming back with a small suitcase, a Vintage-vanity bag of sorts.
“Excuse the change of luggage, but it’s neatly sorted and stacked for ease of use and access. I want you to have this to pay for the wedding expenses. That will make it part of a happy event, and make up for its origin.”
She looked at him curiously, and when she opened the bag things fell into place.
“How much is there?” She asked.
Michel shrugged.
“Seventy thousand Dollars? I think.”
He grabbed her shoulder when she blinked and nearly fainted.
“Dear God Michel, I have never had that much money in my life.”
He laughed.
“Neither have I, that’s why it’s easy to part with I guess.”
She closed the bag and put it aside, shaking her head.
“We will have an amazing wedding, I promise,” she said.
“I want to get married in a church, that’s my only input to what you do. Everything else you can do with as you wish, but the ceremony needs to be in a church.”
She nodded her agreement.
“Okay, we can get married in St. Benedict’s Catholic church in Galveston, it’s beautiful, and my mother was buried there.”
<
br /> He had no idea how much their lives would change by the time they finally said ‘I do’.
They snuggled on the couch discussing these odd details, and she suddenly looked up at him.
“If you gave me my mother’s ring, my dad knows about this right?”
It was more a statement than a question, but he nodded anyway.
“I am old fashioned and I asked his blessing first, he knew how much it would mean to you to have your mother’s rings.”