Imagine my surprise, then, when a couple of days after we had returned to Seattle, I received a call from him. I hadn’t even answered it because I never answered numbers I didn’t recognize, but when I had listened to the message he left me, I had actually squealed with excitement.
It hadn’t even occurred to me that I’d never given him my number, something that would have put an end to the possibility of dating with most men. Drew just wasn’t most men. He had convinced somebody, he still wouldn’t tell me who, to give him my number and had asked me to go out with him again just the way he’d promised.
Finding the time to go on those dates wasn’t exactly easy for two people with such strenuous, strange schedules, but somehow, we had made it work. We had gone on two dates since that first strange evening, and each one had only made me like Drew more. I knew things were getting to the point where I would need to tell Emma that something was going on. I just wasn’t sure how to tell when that point really was.
In the five years since her father’s death, I had never dated a man seriously enough to want to tell Emma much about him. Now that I was pretty sure that Drew was different than the other men, I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to proceed.
“It’s about a boy, isn’t it?” Emma asked.
“What? What makes you say that?”
“Because, Mama, it’s always about a boy. Am I right? I’m totally right, right?”
“You might be,” I said.
“I knew it! That’s how come you’re acting so squiggly all of the time.”
“Squiggly, huh? I don’t think I’ve ever heard that used as an adjective for a person before.”
“That’s how you’ve been acting, though,” she insisted. “What’s his name?”
“Who?” I asked, teasing her.
“The boy, silly!”
“Oh, you’re right, silly me. His name is Drew.”
“Does he have a last name?” she asked.
“What are you, my mother?”
“Come on! I just want to know!”
“Yes, he has a last name. It’s Larson. His name is Drew Larson.”
“Is he a good one?” she asked seriously.
I stared at my daughter, wondering where on earth she had learned to ask that. This was exactly the kind of thing I’d been worried about having to talk to her about, although I hadn’t realized it. It was a good question, but it was one I wasn’t sure how to answer.
I wanted him to be a good one. I knew that. I’d wanted that badly enough to break my cardinal rule about dating pilots before I had even known him at all. The m
ore time I spent with him, the more I wanted that, but I still couldn’t be sure. I wasn’t sure how long you had to know a man to know if he was a good one or not. There was a part of me that thought that after the loss of Matt, I would never know if a man was a “good one” or not. It was certainly not the kind of question I felt up to answering on the fly, while my ten-year-old watched me with narrowed, skeptical eyes.
“He’s a pilot, so that means he’s not a loser,” I said. “So yes, I guess you could say he’s a good one.”
“No, Mama.” She rolled her eyes before looking at me like I was the most foolish woman on the planet. “That’s not what makes a boy a good one. It’s not the kind of job he has.”
“No?”
“Nope. Not the job.”
“What is it, then?” I asked.
“It’s about whether or not he wants to put a ring on it!”
My mouth dropped open, and Emma broke into a massive fit of giggles. She jumped up, our game momentarily forgotten, and broke into the whole Beyonce song and dance. It was another one of those things I’d never suspected she’d picked up on at such a young age, and the shock of the comment had startled me badly.
“Emma! Emma, sweetie, hold on. Stop that for a minute and sit down.”