Chapter 3: The Proposal

The Dallas Suit, June 2011

Scott pulls into Janie’s driveway at 402 North Alamo in the Vanquish, the car’s dark-blue paint reflecting the street lamps like deep water. He is wearing the charcoal, two-button suit Janie picked out for him in Dallas, the one that communicates effort without performance. The collar of his white shirt is open. No tie. A tie would’ve been too much, and Janie would’ve known something was coming before he cleared the porch.

Red hops out before Scott can come around for him and trots across the yard, nose working the evening air, cataloguing who has been here, what walked through, and how long ago. The night turns his reddish coat black along his shoulders. His tail swings once, an idle metronome, and he circles back toward the front step to wait.

The ring is in Scott’s left jacket pocket, a velvet box that weighs almost nothing and contains everything he’s been building toward since a teenaged version of himself walked up these steps, knocked on this same door, and asked Janie Mendoza to homecoming. She came running down the stairs and said yes before he finished the sentence. After touching the box once through the fabric and confirming its position, he pulls it from his pocket with shaking hands. He fumbles the box open, and the ring hits the ground. He curses and drops to a knee to search for it in the dark. Red is past him before he can move, nose down, and finds it at once. Scott picks it up and checks it under the light of his phone. A scratch mars the band. He rubs his thumb over it, shoves the ring back in the box, and wipes his palms on his pants. The porch light flickers on, and the screen door opens before he reaches it.

Connie stands in the frame with a dish towel over one shoulder, her dark hair pinned back, her eyes already narrowing. She takes in the suit, the open collar, the pressed trousers, the shoes that aren’t his boots, and her mouth opens and then closes without producing a word. This is, in Scott’s experience, unprecedented.

“Scott,” she says. “What is this?”

“Evening, Connie.”

“You’re wearing a suit.”

“I am.”

She looks past him to the driveway and stops. The Vanquish sits there, low and foreign against the modest houses on North Alamo, nothing that belongs in front of this porch. “Scott, whose car is that?”

“Mine,” he says. “Recent purchase.”

Connie looks at the car again, then back at him. Whatever she’s calculating doesn’t reach her mouth. The boy she has fed since he was fourteen has just parked a car in her driveway that costs more than her house. She looks past him to Red on the step, as though the dog might provide clarification. Red offers nothing. She steps back and holds the door, and Scott enters the house, the Mendoza home, the family that took in a foster kid from Broken Creek and never once treated him like a guest. The screen door has never locked for him. The kitchen always smells of something Connie’s been cooking since noon.

Today it’s tamales. Tom, visiting from Oregon with Eve and the boys, is at the dining table with a glass of iced tea; his boys are somewhere deeper in the house producing loud noises that belong to children having fun. Eve sits across from him, her phone facedown on the table, one elbow hooked over the back of the chair. She stopped being a guest in this kitchen years ago. Tom looks up when Scott enters and reads the suit in the same order Connie did. His eyebrows rise.

“Scott.”

“Tom.”

“You look like you’re going to a deposition.”

“Not today.”

Hector is in his chair by the fireplace, the Fort Stockton Pioneer folded on his knee, reading glasses pushed up onto his forehead. He sets the paper down when Scott comes through the living room and studies him with the unhurried attention he has given Scott since their first handshake, the one that became an embrace before Scott understood what was happening. Hector doesn’t comment on the suit; his eyes move from Scott’s face to the left jacket pocket and back, and he doesn’t look surprised.

“Janie’s upstairs,” Hector says.

“Yes, sir.”

“She’s been up there for an hour doing something to her hair that I’m not qualified to describe.”

Scott nods. “I’ll wait.”

He doesn’t sit. He stands in the living room with his hands at his sides, aware of Connie watching from the kitchen doorway, Tom from the dining table, Hector from his chair, and he lets them look. There’s nothing to hide. The suit is doing what he intended it to do, telling every person in this house that something special is about to happen, and no one is going to say it before he does.

Janie comes down the stairs in a white cotton sundress with her hair loose around her shoulders, and she stops on the third step from the bottom. Her eyes find him. They move across the suit, the open collar, his face, and then down to his left hand, which isn’t holding anything yet but is close to the pocket that contains everything.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hey.”

“You’re wearing the Dallas suit.”

“I am.”

“Should I be concerned or excited?”

On the Doorstep

“Come outside with me.”

She tilts her head and looks at him a moment longer than the question needs. She comes down the last three steps and takes his hand, and her grip is firm, and she doesn’t ask again.

They walk through the living room. Hector watches them pass. Connie has the dish towel against her mouth with both hands. Tom is on his feet. Eve’s phone is up and angled at them.

The screen door swings open. Red shifts to the side of the step without standing, giving them room. The evening light is low and inviting across the front yard, the West Texas dusk that stretches the shadows long and turns everything amber before the dark comes in. The Vanquish sits in the driveway where he left it.

Scott stops on the step where he has stood a hundred times before, the same threshold where Hector first shook his hand.

Behind them, through the screen door and the front window, the Mendoza family has gathered. Connie has both palms against the door. Hector stands behind her, one hand on her shoulder. Tom and Eve are at the window beside the door, Eve’s phone raised and recording. Tom’s boys have pushed between the adults to get a view, their small faces at the bottom of the glass, not understanding what’s happening but knowing that the adults have stopped everything to watch it.

Scott turns to face Janie. She’s watching him, her lips parted, her hands at her sides now because she let go of his hand when they stopped, and she’s giving him the space to do whatever he’s about to do.

Scott reaches into the left pocket and takes out the velvet box. He opens it. The ring catches the light, a single diamond on a platinum band.

He doesn’t kneel. He stands in front of her and says what he means in the plainest language he has.

“Janie. I want to marry you. I want to build a life with you. Will you marry me?”

She says “yes” before the last word leaves his mouth.

Her hands are on his face and her lips are on his, and the ring box is between them, pressing into his chest, and behind them through the door Connie produces a sound that isn’t a word. Scott hears Hector’s chair exhale, Tom saying something to Eve that he can’t make out, Red’s tail sweeping once across the concrete.

He pulls back enough to take the ring from the box and slide it onto Janie’s left hand. It fits. He measured while she slept three months ago, using a strip of paper and a ruler. As the band settles against her finger, the platinum band catches the light, clean and unbroken, and the scratch is gone. He turned the ring under his phone’s flashlight not ten minutes ago and ran his thumb across the scratch where it hit the driveway, and now the surface is flawless, as though the fall never happened. He looks at the band once more and lets it go. Janie’s eyes are on his, and that’s where his attention belongs.