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“Tell me about your fiancée. What is his name?”
There was no segue and I didn’t know how else to ask, but to just ask. There was something that she was keeping from me, but I had no idea what it was. She got weird when questions went to her fiancée, and I was still trying to figure out why.
“Dalian.”
“Is that it?”
Augustine sighed. “He is close to my family and their first choice.”
I knew that our families were likely different, but it was the way that she said it. Why do they have a say and why was there more than one choice?
“What about your choice?”
She shrugged. “My time is up. I am getting older, so it was decided that it was time for me to get married.”
I looked at her and I must have shown how crazy what she was saying was. Why would she get married because it was time? Augustine was younger than me by several years.
“Why do I get the feeling that you don’t want to get married?”
Augustine shrugged. “Like I said before. Not everyone gets to do what they want. Not all of us have many choices.”
I didn’t know what that meant, but I was even more confused with Augustine’s situation. How could I win her back when I didn’t even know who she was with?
10
Derrick
The conference was full, and I looked over my notes. Augustine had written them for me after I’d given her a few napkins’ worth of material. Augustine was a lifesaver and in this instance, I was able to go through it quickly. We’d had a nice lunch, but I hadn’t seen her since then, and now I wondered what was going to happen between us. I had missed my chance it felt like.
I gave my speech, answered about an hour’s worth of questions and had to beg off finally because I wanted to get out of there. I was known as a guru in the field of making money because I was good at it. I did these talks, supposedly to help other people be like me, knowing that luck played a large part in my success.
When it was over I had an ego boost. Augustine told me that I looked and sounded great, but that’s not what I was looking for. I didn’t want her to swoon. I wanted to finish the conversation we had started. I asked her if she wanted to go out and she agreed. I was glad to have another opportunity before we left, though we did have all night.
The bar had burgers, so we ordered a couple and got a drink each. Augustine played some of the set for me and it looked pretty good. It looked like it had what we were looking for. Augustine wanted feedback, but I wasn’t in the mood. I wanted to talk.
“Are you going to invite me to the wedding?”
Augustine looked blankly at me for a minute, and I realized that she wasn’t worried about that at all.
“It’s going to be a small affair.”
“If you invite people, you get nice presents.”
I was trying to entice her, but instead I got a very serious look. “I will have to give my notice soon, Derrick. You won’t be invited because you will not be my boss any longer.”
I was shocked at her words, and she didn’t seem all that worried about them. She was sipping on her drink like she hadn’t just dropped a bombshell. She had and I wanted answers. What did she mean that I wouldn’t be her boss any longer? I mean, I knew what that meant, but why was she leaving? What had I missed?
“If it is because of the trip, I just thought you might like to come and do some creative work. It wasn’t meant to offend you in any way.” I hated myself for it, but I could hear the panic in my voice.
Augustine smiled at me and sighed. “It’s nothing to do with you. I would continue to work for you if I could. It is tradition that I do not work. I promise that if I could, I would. I like to stay busy and not depend on another for my money.”
“You know this sounds crazy, don’t you? You sound like you have been set up by your family and you don’t have a choice.”
Augustine said that it was closer to the truth than she wanted to admit. “It’s not exactly an arranged marriage, but my family made promises to his family if we were both single when I turned twenty-five. I am single, so now we are being told that we should wed. It’s like a snowball that is going downhill, getting bigger and I have no idea how to stop it.”
“Do they still do that?”
Augustine agreed. “If you have a family like mine, then yes. I really don’t know what to tell them. He came by a couple weeks back and asked me to marry him. I barely know him, haven’t even gone on a date with him and in a couple of weeks, I will be his wife.”
