The Near Miss by Fran Cusworth

until she gasped.
    â€˜Oh, sweet.’
    â€˜Don’t hurt her.’ Melody smiled. The children moved apart.
    â€˜Doesn’t hurt!’ Lotte shrieked. ‘Come and see my room!’
    Tom emerged, in King Gee shorts and dusty boots and hair thick with grease. ‘This is Tom!’ Grace smiled at him threateningly. ‘Darling, you didn’t have to dress up for us!’
    He offered the newcomers his hand, and then looked at its oily state apologetically and withdrew it.
    â€˜So you saved our little girl’s life.’ Tom said. ‘How do we thank you?’
    Maybe by having a shower, thought Grace. Melody winced modestly and raised a hand as if to bat away gratitude. Grace could see they would have to stop thanking her; she didn’t like it. Which would make it even harder to find things to talk about. The man she had brought smelled so strongly of cigarettes and alcohol that her eyes watered. She had a sudden and passionate need to steer them out of this passageway and into the lounge room.
    â€˜Come, sit down. Tom, go and have a shower and hurry up!’ A mock scolding tone for the benefit of the visitor, who should have smiled in appropriate amusement at the foibles of men. That was what women did. Melody, however, just watched Tom leave with grave eyes.

    Eddy held the ring box in his pocket and jiggled it between his fingers. He had spent the week in anunhealthy, sleep-deprived anxiety, and he knew he was now obsessed with finding the right place to propose marriage. It was Romy’s own fault, with her superstitious belief that the way things began determined their outcome. He knew she would put unnecessary emphasis on how the proposal was made, and, if she said yes, she would for the rest of their married lives link events back to the circumstances surrounding this momentous question. For her sake, he wanted it to be perfect. But was it for his own sake, too? Did he want to give himself the best chance? Was he in fact not sure she would say yes? But who could ever be sure of anything, he wondered, as he sat on the bed and folded a cotton handkerchief into the pocket of his pants. Romy had been in the bathroom for half an hour now, and Eddy really needed to urinate. He went to the back garden and peed on the lemon tree, zipped himself and put his hand back in his pocket, stroking the velvet of the ring box as if it was his future. Their unborn children would one day ask him Dad, how did you propose to Mum? and he wanted to have something passable to tell them. Should he book a flash restaurant? Such a cliché, though. No, tonight was full moon, a fortuitous coincidence he had seized upon when Romy had mentioned it this morning, and the forecast was fine. They would go to this dinner at the family of the rescued child, and spend an evening basking in the gratitude of these thankful people — Grace seemed very nice, and her husband, Tom, was an inventor, Romy would like that. Then, on the way home (moon rise was 11.07pm, he had checked in the paper), he would take a detour to the Royal Botanic Gardens in South Yarra, park under the elm trees on the east side, and take Romy to the low part of the fence where they had entered in the first week of their relationship, five years before. On that night, another full moon, they had frolicked through the dark park like Puck and Titania, finally stopping in a copse of endangered cycads to fuck awkwardly under some palm fronds, the far-off torch of the wandering park guard forcing them to choke back their giggles. Eddy had never before done such a thing, and he knew he had scored fullpoints for it, and it had taken years to occur to Romy that he probably would never risk it again. Anyway, he would take them back to this holy site and hope to absorb some of that Puckish spirit, and make a proposal that would be remembered for a lifetime. Hopefully she wouldn’t want to actually shag there again; Eddy’s heart raced with anxiety