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through the first game, Gina nudged my side. “Who’s the boy?” she asked.
    I scanned the gym and immediately saw who she was talking about. A tall boy with shoulder-length bleached-out blond hair was sitting alone on the bleachers near the net. He was following Jackie’s every movement with a look on his face somewhere between rapture and the way you look when you have the flu. If I thought my daughter was lovely, this boy was closer to something you would call glorious, if only because of the way he seemed to glow as he watched her. If I had been a photographer, I would have made a fortune capturing his profile for a Gap ad, or an Abercrombie billboard. If I had been a builder of boy bands, I would have tapped this one to be my lead singer, whether he could carry a tune or not.
    “I have no idea,” I said. I couldn’t take my eyes off the boy who couldn’t take his eyes off Jackie. I felt an odd affinity for him. My relationship with my daughter was mostly about my watching her. I sat on the sidelines at volleyball games, sat in the driver’s seat as we drove to the orthodontist or a tournament somewhere down in Orange Country. I sat on the periphery as she took tests and went to dances and went to the movies with her friends. Occasionally, I offered a suggestion about something—which colleges to put on the list of possibilities or which dress looked better of two she was considering— but mostly I just watched. I was like this boy: sitting on the sidelines, taking it all in, unable to turn away.
    “He looks like he’s in love,” Gina said.
    “Can you be in love at age fifteen?” I asked.
    “Romeo and Juliet were only fourteen,” she said. “Love at first sight knows no age limits.”
    Rick and I weren’t kids when we met—I was twenty-six, he was twenty-nine—and it didn’t take us long to realize what we felt for each other. After our third date, he took me to his parents’ house for dinner. I was fretting about what to wear and what to take as a hostess gift, when Rick just stopped, took me by the shoulders and said, “April. Listen to me. My mother will be making brownies from a box for dessert. She has pet ducks. It’s going to be fine.”
    It was more than fine. Julia Newton’s house was framed by beds of iceberg rose bushes, which she tended herself. There was a little gurgling brook with a pond for the ducks, who would parade around after her. She did, indeed, have a thing for brownies from a box and always had a row of Betty Crocker in her pantry. Her couches were all comfortable; her rooms were all large and airy. She had done the books for the family plumbing business when it operated out of one small warehouse and later ran the whole accounting department. I liked her from the moment I laid eyes on her, and I was desperate that she like me.
    I needn’t have worried. When it came time for dessert, she asked me to help her in the kitchen. The brownies had twenty minutes left to cook, but she pulled them out of the oven, took a tub of whipped cream cheese out of the refrigerator and said to me, “This is the secret family recipe.”
    “Cream cheese?”
    She nodded. “You swirl it through with twenty minutes left to go and the boxed brownies become instantly gourmet.”
    “Sounds good,” I said.
    “I thought you should know.”
    I had been dating her son for three weeks; I had met her less than three hours before. I was having trouble following what she was saying.
    “You and Rick are a very good match,” she said, and then I got it—and not only that, I agreed. I was in love, maybe not at first sight, but it was love with a good man who loved me back. I blushed.
    I turned from my trance back to the volleyball game just in time to see the tangle of arms and the ball come down on Jackie’s outstretched hand, and Jackie fall to the ground and scream. I got to her at the same time as the blond boy and the coach. The boy put his hand on her bare sweaty shoulder. I’d like to say