Anton Chekhov, the legendary Russian short story writer and playwright, had a famous dictum about plotting.One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.
This is known as Chekhov’s Gun or, in our case, Chekhov’s Security Guard. Duke had brought up the possibility of security guards, and lo and behold, here one was, like we’d summoned him.
“Not moving,” Duke said to the guard.
“I’m definitely not moving,” I added. “The ride’s not on.”
The security guard, a lean, tall man with intelligent but wary eyes, strode up to us.
He stood about ten feet away from Duke, still standing at the ride’s controls, and I stayed on my hare, hands tight on the pole. And yes, I did feel unbelievably stupid about the whole thing.
“You two have permission to be here?” the guard demanded.
“Define ‘permission,’ ” I said.
The guard looked at me. “Someone said you could be here?”
“Well, no. We don’t have permission, then,” I replied.
Duke lifted his hand slightly in my direction, the universal signal of a man telling a woman to let him handle this. Well, good luck, Chicago. If there was a way to get out of this guy calling the cops on us, I didn’t see it.
Then again, I wasn’t Duke.
“Look, old chap, I’m terribly sorry. This is all my doing,” Duke began. He put his hands back into his jacket pockets and shrugged. “Her father brought her mother here on their first date years ago. And I brought her here on our first date. My work is about to transfer me to the East Coast, so I wanted to see the old place one last time. Romance and all that. She didn’t even know what I’d planned.”
The security guard was unarmed, it appeared. No gun in sight. He might have had pepper spray on him, but it was his walkie-talkie that worried me. All he had to do was radio the authorities, and we would be dragged out in handcuffs. And when they tried to book Duke and found out he had no identification on him? Disaster.
“That’s all? Why don’t I believe you?” the guard asked us.
His hand began to lift toward his walkie-talkie.
“Well, to be perfectly honest with you…it’s not all,” Duke said. He glanced over his shoulder at me and grinned. “I didn’t want to do it like this, but it seems fate had other plans.”
Duke pulled his hand from his pocket and showed my ring to the security guard.
“Do you mind?” he asked the guard. “Before you lock us up and throw away the key?”
The guard was a half-step ahead of me; I was still trying to figure out why Duke had told the guy my parents had come here on their first date.
Then the guard broke into a smile, and when I saw that ear-to-ear,can’t-wait-to-tell-the-guys-about-this grin,I knew what was happening.
“Go for it,” the guard said. “I’ll take pics.”
Duke walked over to me and got down on one knee.
“Rainy, my darling…If you were a book, I would read every page of you in one sitting and then when it was over, I’d start back at page one and read you again. If our life together was a story, I’d want it to be a million pages long, a billion pages. I hope there are scenes in the book of our love that burn holes in the paper. I hope the happy chapters are the longest and the saddest chapters are barely a page. And I hope and pray that however our story ends, it ends with us together and the last word of the story of our life is ‘forever.’ Will you, Rainy March, please do me the honor of letting me become your husband?”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. “Well?” the guard said. “Don’t leave the poor guy hanging. Yes or no?”
“Sorry, I’m in shock,” I said. “I never imagined I’d get proposed to while I was sitting on a giant hare. But yes. Yes, I will marry you. And, um…thanks for asking.”
Duke took my left hand and put the ring on my ring finger, where it belonged and always would belong.
Before I could say anything, he stood up, leaned in close, and tenderly kissed me.
“This is great,” the guard said, laughing and waving his phone at us. “I took a bunch of pictures. I’ll text them to you. A couple breaking in to get engaged on the carousel was not on my bingo card.” He laughed again.
Duke chortled in triumph. “Told you it was a carousel.”
