Excerpt: The Rescue

After fourteen months of steady dating, Jennine was getting a little anxious. Trevor should be proposing marriage to her by now. Why was he so slow? One evening, after they watched an adventure drama movie that Trevor had been wanting to see, Jennine began to throw out hints.
"My mother was cleaning out the attic today, and she found her wedding dress," she said, as they walked along, holding hands, toward her parents' house.
"Oh?" he asked, not sure how else to respond.
"Yeah," she said with a giggle. "I tried it on."
"Oh?" he said again, afraid to venture forward with any other response.
"It is so eighties!" she said. "But, it is kind of pretty, in an old-fashioned way."
"Yeah," he said, feeling brave to comment further, "they wore some crazy fashions in the eighties. When I think eighties, I think of John Travolta and 'Saturday Night Fever'."
This conversation was not taking the direction that Jennine wanted it to take. She would have to try another angle. She thought for a minute, and then proceeded.
"My mother was my age when she got married," she said, glancing quickly at him to see if she could read his response in his expression.
"Oh?" he said, retreating to safer territory.
"Yeah," she said. "I don't think it is too young to marry, do you?"
"Well...I..." he stammered.
"I mean," she expounded, "if a person meets someone they enjoy being with, it's better that they marry, and then they can be together, don't you think?"
"Well, yeah," he said. That sounded reasonable to him.
"It would be nice," she said, "if we could be together."
Trevor was silent.
"It would be nice," she bravely forged ahead, "if, instead of you walking me to my parents' home tonight, that we could be together in our own home."
Trevor was silent, but he was thinking. It would be nice, actually, he thought.
"Did you want to get married?" he asked her, hesitantly. Why was he asking her this? He hadn't planned to ask her. Not now. But, it would be nice to go home to Jennine after working at the drug store, rather than to his parents.
Jennine stopped walking and faced him.
"Are you proposing to me?" she asked.
"Well, I guess I am," he said.
"You guess you are?" she asked.
Jennine looked so pretty under the street lamp, standing so close to him, that he bent down and kissed her, very gently, unsure of her response, fearing rejection. She kissed him back.
"You guess you are?" she asked again.
"Will you marry me, Jennine?" he asked.
"Yes!" she said, and she started to cry.
They set their wedding date for the following summer, ten months away. It would give them plenty of time to carry out Jennine's plan. Jennine wanted the time to make sure she followed her plan step by step. She wanted the right dress, the right cake, the right attendants, the right flowers. Everything had to be perfect down to the smallest detail.
Now, rather than just standing in the drug store reading the bride magazines, Jennine bought them and poured over them, cutting out photos and pasting together a collage of how her wedding was going to look. Organizing the wedding consumed every spare minute of Jennine's time. Trevor was puzzled. It seemed she was so busy preparing for the wedding that she had no time for him. They rarely went out together, they rarely even spoke with one another because she was simply too busy. She was going to be a bride. Her big day was fast approaching and she wanted no one to get in her way. Trevor was not to break into her dream with his talk of movies and music. It was the wedding that was important.
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After Pearl's second divorce, she realized she needed something to occupy her mind while she waited for Karl. She turned to birds. It all came about accidently, when one day, a friend of hers asked her to mind her parrot for her. Pearl, reluctant at first because she had never had any pets, agreed when her friend offered her fifty dollars to mind the bird.
The parrot was huge and irritable, squawking and ruffling its wings when it was mad, which was more often than not. His name was Sweety and he was unpleasant. To shut him up at night time so she could sleep, Pearl would throw a sheet over the top of his enormous cage and turn out the lights. That would quiet Sweety until he got hungry in the morning.
Pearl's friend had originally said she would be gone only for ten days. She was going on a Mexican cruise. But after the ten days were up, her friend did not return. Pearl waited. Her friend did not show up within a month, within two months, but after three months, Pearl received a phone call from her. She said she was sorry, but she would not be back. There was some problem with her back taxes and she found it safer to stay out of this country and stay in Belize. Besides, she said, it was very nice in Belize.
Pearl was not happy. What was she to do with that bird? She put an ad on Craigslist, but got no takers. She checked into the possibility of shipping the bird to Belize. It was not possible.
By this time, as Pearl thought about, she was becoming attached to Sweety. He was so dependent on her. She had never thought she would get attached to a bird, but she could not help it. The bird was such an innocent creature. Besides, she noticed that her preoccupation with the bird took her mind off of Karl.
Her daughter, Heather hated the bird. Heather did not like anything that competed with the attention she thought that she should be getting from her mother. During the time when Pearl's attentions were focused on Karl, Heather would be rude to him, and he never understood why. He would greet her when he saw her coming home from school and she would simply ignore him. Then when Karl married, she thought she was safe. Now she had to compete with a bird. She hated Sweety.
Sometimes out of spite, Heather would go downstairs at night and lift the sheet from the bird's cage just to make him squawk. Then Pearl would come running downstairs to see what was wrong. Heather would also tease him with his treats, holding them too far away so that he would have to stretch his neck through the bars of his cage, struggling to reach them.
Then one day he got out.
Heather was alone in the house, in the kitchen eating cookies and reading a magazine. She did not notice the big bird walking down the hallway towards her. He crept along, slowly plodding his way down toward the kitchen. Heather sat at the table, with her earphones on, listening to her iPod and eating cookies and in crept Sweety. Heather realized she needed a little more milk to finish her cookie and when she stood up to get it, she turned and almost ran into Sweety.
She screamed and Sweety began furiously flapping his wings and squawking, flying up in the air. Heather turned and ran from the room, crying. Sweety, landed on the table and ate the rest of the cookies. He was very sick that night, and Heather was grounded by her mother for not watching the bird.