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have immediately rethought his position.
    Then again, if her mother were here, she and her dad wouldn’t be having this conversation.
    A waitress appeared beside their booth, and her father asked for a cup of coffee. Emmie told her father she didn’t have much time left for lunch and ordered a salad. As her father read the menu quickly and chose an omelet, Emmie hid behind her phone again.
    Circle-O loaded, and she thought about all her old classmates with their perfect lives on display. She’d bet anything their parents didn’t ignore the anniversary of a loved one’s death. Heck, she’d bet that nobody in their families had even died yet. They probably all still had both their parents and all their grandparents, artfully arranged around an elaborately laden dining room table like a Norman Rockwell painting.
    Bob Brewster sat back and studied his daughter. “I didn’t forget the date, you know. That was why I went.”
    Now she did put the phone down. “What!”
    “I can’t sit around at home, staring at the walls. You think I don’t do that enough as it is?”
    “So you ran away.”
    “No!” he protested. “Emmaline, I loved your mother—you know I did. But she’s gone, and I’m still here.” Her father sighed, looked away. “When your mother died, I was ready to curl up and die, too. And there were times I wished I had. But after a while, when I got up each morning and realized I wasn’t going anywhere, I started to see things differently. Do you understand that?” She sat still, her insides in a muddle, surprised that he was able to say this much. “It’s just . . . I don’t feel old. Okay, maybe first thing in the morning, when it takes me a few minutes to get out of bed.” He chuckled ruefully. “But up here”—he tapped his temple—“twenty-two, maybe. I want to see what else this life has to offer while I’m still ‘with it’.”
    Please don’t talk about senior-citizen sex, please don’t talk about senior-citizen sex, Emmie prayed silently.
    “And,” he continued pointedly, “I want to be around to see my little girl get married and give me grandchildren!”
    Emmie rolled her eyes. Why was it that, when children grew up, parents only measured their worth in terms of the number of grandchildren produced?
    The waitress set their food in front of them, and Emmie stared down at her salad. Sliced hardboiled eggs stared back up at her. She sighed and picked up her fork. She wanted to be angry at her father. She really did. But—and she hated to admit this—what he said made a certain amount of sense. If this was what it took to make him feel better about still being here when his wife wasn’t, who was she to begrudge him that? Didn’t mean she had to like it, though.
    “How’s that man Kyle of yours?”
    Oh, that was inevitable. Emmie started poking at her salad. “Same,” was all she’d offer. “Good,” she lied, then dodged with, “Tell me about Saint Lucia.”
     
    That session with her father was enough to drive her to the sanctuary of Trish’s house after work to let her best friend talk her down. Because Trish was so darned good at it.
    Trish leaned her dining room chair on the two back legs to see into the living room. “Justin!” she barked. “You on the computer?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Doing homework?”
    Pause. “Yes?”
    “Liar. Let Aunt Emmie use it.” She plonked the front legs of her chair back onto the carpet. Emmie started to protest, but Trish whispered, “I think he’s got a girlfriend. Lots of instant messaging lately. Let him get off the computer for five minutes—” She interrupted herself with a bellow, “Get off , Justin!” then continued calmly, “So he can do something healthy, like play violent video games.”
    Once Justin had moved on to blowing up aliens on the Nintendo, Emmie checked her work e-mail through her Web access. She didn’t really care if Wilma had left her any after-hours messages, nor whether a vendor or client urgently