Pocket Full of Posies

Chapter Twenty-One

   When Isaac and I first talked about marriage, I was like a kid at Christmas. I tried not to do the girl thing and obsess over it, but well….that didn’t exactly work out. We’d been skirting around the idea for years, but nothing concrete was ever stated. All the time we’d say stuff that involved spending the rest of our lives together. I was serious, but I could never quite tell if I was coming off too strongly so I tried to play it off jokingly. What was the point in obsessing over the idea of becoming a wife—Isaac’s wife—when it would probably not happen for several more years?

  So when he did propose….I freaked out. Everyone else saw it coming—he’d had it all prepared. And at my graduation party, in front of everyone, he went down on one knee. I’d been so thrilled I had cried like a maniac and I swear I hadn’t let go of him the entire evening. It was the perfect moment in that moment. I thought I’d forever remember how insanely happy I felt; how my head felt above the clouds and how it all just seemed so surreal.

  Now I thought about different things.

  I thought about how Joanna had disappeared moments before the proposal. I thought about how she’d gone home without telling anyone and how she called me the next morning to congratulate me. And now I thought about what she’d said to me about that night before she ran off with my former fiancé.

  Against my better judgment, I’d gone to meet with her. Aunt Nelly had told me I would regret not knowing for the rest of my life. Uncle Harmon had suggested he club Isaac over the head with a hammer.

  “I want you to know this isn’t just a fling,” she’d told me after all the ‘I-never-meant-to-hurt-you’ bullshit. “We really do love eachother. I don’t know when it happened, but…I think I’ve always loved him. I don’t think I knew it until he told me he was going to propose to you. And that whole night of your party I was just tortured thinking about it. So I left. I couldn’t stomach seeing him propose to you when I just realized he should be with me.”

  Directly afterwards she’d said again how sorry she was. I should have reacted. The most reaction they got from me was when I saw them together. After that it was like I was a brick wall. What was the point in reacting? They knew—they had to know—how I felt. It was pretty obvious.

  It kind of sucked watching movies now with a proposal because inevitably it’d lead me back to mine; which made me feel pretty bitter and self-centered. Sometimes you just can’t help it though. I kept it in my thoughts and choked down my bitter bile like I had been doing these past few months. It never really got any easier.

  Lissie and Brady weren’t even paying attention. They’d picked out this Redbox special and now all they could do was giggle and poke at eachother on the love seat. I ignored the cheesy teen love story playing in the background and started sifting through classlists.

  “OH MY GOD!!”

  Brady and Lissie broke apart. I, nearly having a heart attack, spun my chair around in the direction my crazed teenaged cousins’ voice had come from. A second later, her and her bouncy red hair came flying into the living room. Her eyes were crazed and her phone was poised in her hand as if she was about to throw it across the room.

  “Scott just asked me out!” she screamed finally. Her entire face broke into a wide ass grin.

  Liss and I looked at eachother with some confusion. “Weren’t y’all already dating?”

  Sally rolled her big eyes. “No that was a wedding thing that doesn’t count. This is real and he’s picking me up himself!” Before she could go into detail, she shouted, “Mom!” and ran in the direction Aunt Nelly was likely in.