Chapter 9: Jess

“Mama, come on!”

“Come on?” I asked. “What are you talking about, sweetie?”

“I mean come on and pay attention! It’s no fun when you aren’t really trying. I don’t want to just be playing by myself.”

I looked at Emma across the coffee table, feeling more than a little bit sleepish. She was right. The two of us had been taking advantage of one of my rare days off by spending the time playing board games. It was one of those rainy days that made you want to stay inside forever, and Emma had always been a huge fan of anything competitive.

Personally, I had never been all that into competitive games, but for her, I would do pretty much anything. It wasn’t like it was her fault that board games weren’t so much my thing, and it definitely wasn’t her fault that she had such a competitive streak in her. She was exactly like her father.

That man had been able to turn everything into something competitive, even seemingly normal things like going to the grocery store. In that way, Emma was exactly like him, which made my heart both heavy and light at the same time. Even after five years, I was still being surprised by the ways in which Emma could still bring me back to Matt. It had been five years already since his death, and I was past the part of mourning where every little part of everyday hurt. But there were still so many surprises.

Emma was growing up more and more every day, and from everything I could see, she was almost a perfect blend of her two parents. It was hard sometimes, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

“What’s with you, Mama?”

“What’s with me?” I laughed, reaching over the coffee table and ruffling Emma’s blonde hair. “That’s a very grownup question, little girl.”

“I’m not so little. And you’re acting funny. Are you sad?”

“No,” I answered with a frown, surprised to have such an astute, if not completely accurate, question coming from a ten-year-old. “I’m really not. What makes you ask that?”

“I told you,” she insisted, her own frown mimicking my own. “You’re acting funny. You’re acting kind of far away.”

“Am I? I’m sorry, I don’t mean to. I guess I’ve just got something on my mind.”

“Duh. What is it?”

I laughed and wondered to myself if I was ready to tell her. Drew had told me that night in the Dallas hotel that he wanted to take me out again, but I hadn’t really believed him. It had seemed more likely that he was trying to find a polite way to get me out of his room as quickly as possible after realizing that I really wasn’t going to sleep with him that night.

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 more 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.”

“Okay, but just so you know, that song’s awesome,” she said, grinning.

“I’m not saying anything about the song, but it’s not always about putting a ring on it. You know that, right?”

“Sure, it is. Why else would you want to date a boy?”

“Are you going to be looking at every boy as a maybe husband when you’re allowed to start dating?” I asked.

“If I’m ever allowed to start dating,” she grumbled, sufficiently bummed out by how long it might be before she could date to sit back down like I’d asked her to.

“Fine, if you’re ever allowed. But are you?”

“No, not at the start. But that’s because I’ll be too young! You aren’t too young. You already had one husband, so I know you’re not too young.”

“You’re right. I’m not, but that’s not my point.”

“Then what is?” she asked.

“My point is that you don’t have to look at every guy you date as somebody that could be your husband someday. Sometimes, you date a guy just to date him, and you don’t think about maybe getting married at all.”

“That sounds like a waste of time to me.”

I laughed in exasperation because at that point, I didn’t know what else I was supposed to do. No matter what I was telling her, Emma had me pegged perfectly. I didn’t like to admit it to myself, but I did look at every guy I dated as a potential husband and stepfather.

It wasn’t something I was going to come right out and say to Drew, of course. It was clear almost immediately that saying something like that was the perfect way to scare a guy like him off. But just because I didn’t say it and hadn’t planned on saying it to anyone for a long, long time didn’t mean the thoughts weren’t in my head. They were. Every guy I dated was a potential father for my daughter, and acknowledging it to myself was a sobering thought.

“I’m sorry, Mama.”

“For what, sweetie?” I answered distractedly, unable to get rid of the thought now that Emma had planted it there. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I don’t know. You look stressed now or something. I don’t want to make you feel bad. I want to make you feel better. That’s the whole thing. I want you to be happy, okay?”

“That’s what I want for you, too.”

“I know,” she said. “But that’s not what I care about! You can’t always think about just me, Mama. I want you to be happy for you, not for me. You have to!”

Her sweet little face had started to scrunch up as she yelled, and by the time she was done, I could see that she was about to cry. Baffled about how we had gone from a typical board game day to something like this, I motioned for her, hugging her to me when she cleared the table and was within arm’s reach. She nestled her head into the hollow of my neck, and for a minute, I found that I had to fight back some tears as well. Moments like these were precious to me, all the more so because I knew they would become less and less frequent as she grew older.

“Tell me something about him,” Emma said.

“I told you his name.”

“Don’t be silly, Mama. Tell me something else. You like him, right?”

“I do. At least I think I do.”

“Then tell me something about him.”

“He’s different, I guess. He’s different than the other guys I’ve been dating.”

“Different how?” she asked.

“He’s more serious, I think. I don’t know him well enough to really say yet, I guess, but that’s the answer I would give for now. He’s more serious.”

“Maybe that’s a good thing,” Emma said.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because,” she answered simply, hugging me even tighter. “The other guys weren’t ones you wanted to tell me about, and this one is. So maybe it’s a good thing that he’s different.”

“You know what? Maybe you’re right.”

“Was my daddy?” she asked.

“I don’t know how to answer that.” I gulped, trying very hard to sound as calm as humanly possible. “I’m not sure what you mean, baby.”

“I was just wondering if Daddy was serious. You said this new guy is different than the guys you date, but is the serious thing different than Daddy was?”

It was a comparison I had never thought to make, or maybe never dared to make. Now that Emma had put it out there, though, it was something I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about. Emma didn’t remember a whole lot about her Dad. She had told me so on more than one occasion, and although it broke my heart a little, it wasn’t exactly a surprise.

She had only been five when the cancer had taken Matt, and that was very young to hold onto memories. Because I knew that about her, I knew she couldn’t understand that she’d hit on a very legitimate point. Matt had been a serious kind of man, far more serious than any of the men I had dated before or after him. Maybe that was where my fear with Drew was really coming from. Maybe it wasn’t the fact that he was a pilot, or that I still didn’t know him all that well.

Maybe the fear wasn’t that he would not be worth my time, but instead, that he was.