Powder Keg

“So, are you planning on proposing to my Mom?”

Uh-oh! The question Ron Hapgood had been dreading since his current significant other, Laurel Treviot, introduced him to her extremely precocious daughter Salisa. Salisa, the asker of this dreaded question, had just turned eleven, had a recorded IQ of 161, and did not suffer fools well. She was also an absolute zealot where her Mom's rights were concerned and never wanted them to be trampled on in any fashion, in short she was a pre-teen powder keg.

In an attempt to keep her from exploding all over him, Ron had been tactfully avoiding being alone with Salisa very much in the past few weeks. Even though he had gotten to know her well in the 10 months, 3 weeks, and 4 days he had been dating Laurel. Somehow he knew that if that pointed a question were to ever come up, it would be offered up by daughter, not mother. However, today, Laurel had asked Ron to take Salisa to soccer practice at this very tough to get to place amid the winding roads of the East Valley. Winding roads that you can only go twenty-five miles an hour on, take time. Time enough for the silence to be deafening, until today it would be cut by the knife of the dreaded question. The front seat of Ron's Buick seemed to echo with the resonance of the weight of it.

Ron felt that tightness in the pit of his stomach usually reserved for the times his Mother: Madame Shame, would come for a visit and turn him into a Guilt Gelding. He would have to be tactful in his response to this query, meet the very idea of it with infinite class and sensitivity.

“Never?” Ron said with a chuckle.

“Excuse me, Ron, but it's been a year!”

“It hasn't even been eleven months.”

“Oh, yes, it has.”

“Oh, really? You recall me being at your tenth birthday party, do you?”

“Now that you mention it... No. But still, it's been more than enough time for you to decide on the issue of permanence.”

“Permanence isn't the issue when it comes to a proposal... Marriage is! And you're smart enough to know that not all marriages are permanent.”

“Yes, and I have the father I haven't seen since I was four to prove it. He shares a commonality with you. He never married my mother either!”

“Look, Salisa, I know you're a bastard. I never held that against you.” Ron said with another, louder chuckle, hoping his wit and charm would win the day, as it always had done with Laurel.

Unfortunately, as he looked across his plush velour bench seat at her, he could almost see the steam coming out of Salisa's ears as she glared at him. The question of her legitimacy had never been a sore spot with her before, so she was angry about the original question, not his lame attempt to deflect the conversation with humor. The bad joke only escalated the tension between the two.

“If you don't plan to propose to my Mom, then why are you in our lives?”

“Wait a minute... 'Our lives?' Ron retorted. “I'm in your mother's life, and you are simply an addendum to that life. And before this little ill-fated drive to your soccer practice field, that's apparently on Mars! I had never really thought of having to answer to you, young lady, as to my intentions.”

“Point of order, from the 'addendum,' my mother and I enjoy a rather symbiotic relationship and what happens to her happens to me. Or in this case, what doesn't happen to her!”

“You know, Salisa, even if I were to propose, the other half of that is your Mom actually saying yes.”

“And do you honestly think a 38 year old woman with a child is going to say no?”

“Your Mom's 38?! She told me she was 36, a year younger than me.”

“Well, apparently, she's a year older than you. Are you going to add that to your excuse pile?”

“My 'excuse pile?!' You really are a piece of work, you know that?”

“And you really are a piece of... Something else.”

“Watch it! I will stop this car, young lady.”

“To do what?!”

“I don't know. My Dad never pulled the car over after he threatened us.”

“At least you had a dad, Hapgood!”

At that, a pall was cast over the front seat of Ron's beloved Regal, and they drove in depressed silence for a good long time, as the drive to the soccer field that Ron was now convinced they would never get to went on relentlessly..

It gave Ron time to think about all the time he spent with Salisa, with and without Laurel around. The silly tea parties, she was still a little girl after all, and though she was smart enough to help him with his taxes last April, she still loved to play. He thought of the time she got a new make up kit and practiced on him, making him look like a strange hybrid of a clown and a hooker. Dress up time always included at least one feather boa and frilly hat. Camping always included s'mores and star gazing. This girl knew her constellations, and could talk to Ron, an amateur astronomer, about it endlessly. The star talk usually ended when she would fall asleep in mid-sentence nestled under his arm.

He thought of all that and more, as he slowly came to the realization that as close as he'd grown to Laurel, Salisa had grown equally close to him. He winced over having called her an addendum, making it seem like she wasn't part of the deal. But before he could apologize to her, Salisa broke the silence.

“I'm sorry, Ron. I didn't mean to yell at you. I just don't want to see my Mom hurt again.”

“Again?”

“Before you, she dated, Eldon.”

“Oh, yeah, Eldon the accountant.”

“Yeah, he was a whiz with numbers. Who do you think taught me how to find all those deductions in your tax return? The only numbers he seemed to be not so good at were the ones involving time. Two years and not a proposal in sight, ever. Oh, he was real comfortable coming over, staying for the weekend, or even days during the week, but it was always... I don't know. Fake Family time for him. A situation he didn't mind visiting, but didn't want to make it his every day life.”

“Must've been tough. Did you push on him too?”

“No. My Mom did. That's when he broke it off and left us. And when I say us, I mean us. I liked Eldon. Well, maybe not his name, but I liked him. My Mom loved him. I could tell. My Mom loves you too. And so do I. That's why I decided to push today. I didn't want to wait another year, grow to love you even more, then... Then...”

Salisa turned away from Ron to look out the window. She rested her forehead on the glass and Ron could see the telltale fog of sobbing, though she wasn't making a sound.

“Look, Salisa, I never thought of being even anybody's 'Fake Dad.' I doubt that I'd be any good at it.”

Salisa sniffed hard before she turned back to look at Ron. “You're great at it.”

“I don't believe it.”

“No, really you're fantastic at it.”

“No, I mean we're here. Unless I miss my guess that is the soccer field at the end of the earth.”

And there it was, like the promised land, they had finally arrived. It may not have been the land of milk and honey, but at this point Ron would settle for the ugly brown grass, white lines you could barely see and ratty looking goal nets.

“First time at this one. The old one was much easier to get to. It was three blocks off the highway.”

“Well, you'd better get going. Thanks to the trek from hell you're already about five minutes late. Why did you switch fields anyway?”

“New coach. He lives around here.”

“Where? In the side of a mountain? There's nowhere around here to live, unless you're a coyote.”

Salisa laughed, a laugh he'd heard before, and that he had hoped to hear again. A laugh that was usually accompanied, as it was today, with a roll of her eyes, and a slight shake of her head. She grabbed her soccer ball and her duffle bag and began to slide out of the car. With the door ajar she stopped to look at Ron.

“I got a proposal for you. Think about what you want. I already know what I want. What my Mom wants. The rest is up to you, but don't make us wait too long. It isn't fair. To us or you.” She began to shut the door then swung it open again. “Oh, and if this guy doesn't work out either, I already volunteered you as our next coach.”

With that she quickly shut the door and jogged away, not quite the powder keg he had been wary of, but always a firecracker, she gave him a lot to think about, and think about it all he would, as the proposal about the proposal would weigh heavily on his mind for the next three weeks. The three weeks during which he would take over the coaching of Salisa's soccer team, having them meet at a much more accessible field, and helping them make the playoffs that year.

After that he would propose to Laurel, marry Laurel, and share his life with Laurel and Salisa. Years later his proudest moment would come when he walked Salisa down the aisle and danced with her at her wedding. These days, more than 25 years into his marriage, he's mostly known as Grandpa to Salisa's brood, a title he carries well, and were you to ask Salisa she would tell you quite assuredly... He's great at it.