PART 1
My name is Linda.
I’m 60, and I honestly believed the romantic part of my life was over.
My husband, Frank, d*ed eight years ago.
He collapsed in our driveway on a Tuesday evening carrying groceries, and by midnight I was a w*dow standing in a hospital hallway holding his car keys.
After that, I had no interest in dating.
I had interest in getting through Tuesdays.
For a long time that was the whole of my ambition.
I kept his reading glasses on the nightstand for three years.
I set two coffee cups out most mornings for the first one, and stopped, and then caught myself doing it again in year four and decided to simply let myself.
Jason worried.
He called every night at nine, from wherever his job had him, and we talked about nothing, and I understood the calls were a rope he was holding one end of.
My friends tried to set me up.
I went to exactly one dinner with a nice retired dentist and spent the whole meal explaining Frank’s lasagna recipe, and the dentist, to his credit, took notes.
Then I met Richard.
He was 62, kind, funny, and never made me feel like I had to become someone younger to be interesting.
We met at the library, of all places, arguing politely over the last copy of a book neither of us ended up finishing.
He had good hands and sad eyes and a way of listening that made you feel like the only radio station in the world.
He’d “left medicine a few years back,” he said, and now did consulting he found boring, and he never elaborated, and I never pushed.
I liked that he didn’t ask about Frank in the first month.
When he finally did, he asked how, not when, and then he asked what Frank had been like, and then he let me talk for an hour and a half about a de*d man, and paid for the coffee.
For six months, we took things slowly.
Coffee became dinner.
Dinner became weekends together.
My son, Jason, was skeptical.
He’s 34 and has always been protective of me, especially since his father d*ed.
“So when do I meet this mystery man?” he kept asking.
“Soon.”
The truth was, I was nervous.
I loved my son.
I was falling in love with Richard.
And I desperately wanted them to like each other.
Finally, at the end of August, Jason invited us over for a barbecue.
Richard seemed nervous on the drive there.
He kept adjusting the vents.
“What if he hates me?”
“He won’t.”
“Sons hate the new man, Linda. It’s practically a job.”
“Jason doesn’t hate anyone. He argues, and then he brings you a plate.”
Jason was in the backyard when we arrived.
The whole street smelled of charcoal and cut grass.
I called his name, and he came around the side of the house, wiping his hands on a towel, sunlight catching the steel watch on his wrist — his father’s watch, the one he’d worn every day since the fun*ral.
