Chapter 7

Brad’s turn:

It’s been two months since a Thanksgiving week turned my life upside down.

Maybe ‘upside down’ is the wrong word. Maybe ‘turned around’ is better. I went from solitary, alone, by myself, to irretrievably partnered up. And it’s staying that way.

Beck and I went to dinner last night – a special one – upscale restaurant, me in a suit, she in a dress that understates itself and lets her natural beauty shine through. Over dinner we decided.

“It’s been long enough, Brad,” she said. “Tell me that you believe...”

“I believe it’s forever.”

She smiled. “I think you’re right. We’re totally working this.”

“I think so.” We’d come out of Thanksgiving week with Becky moving in with me. Since then, we’ve speckled the map visiting such local attractions as we could handle in December and January. We have some trips planned. Now I’ve got the mate for this stuff. We know how to do real things with other real people and I want to do them with Becky.

“I’m gonna put the house on the market, Brad.”

“Kinda makes this permanent, doesn’t it?”

“I think it’s permanent. YOU think it’s permanent. So – permanent!”

“Do it, then. It’s just sitting there. You said you were gonna sell it anyway, before you and I got together.”

“I did. And the money ... our cottage plans...”

“That piece of land we looked at?”

“Buy it,” she said. “Start looking for a contractor. We need a nest.”

It was a good dinner.

She got a job with the local library system.

“Back to being a plain ol’ librarian,” she said when they called her back.

“For a person who reads as much as you do, that’s not a bad thing, right?”

“No, it’s really not. I have a job. I’m contributing. I’ll be busy.”

“Plus,” I pointed out, “nobody carries off ‘sexy librarian’ like you do...”

Got kissed hard for that one.

“I can’t help it. Fetish, okay?”

“You just keep having your crazy ol’ fetishes,” she sighed between kisses. “Short hair. Small tits. And librarian.”

“And that makes you perfect.”

Almost. We’re not in the middle of a lot of family stuff. Like many modern families, we’re dispersed, spread out, but occasionally something draws the far-flung branches together. In our case, it was a remotely located aunt who passed away.

We flew to Ohio together for the funeral.

Cousins we hadn’t seen in years were, like us, gathering for the funeral of the family’s matriarch.

I stretched to recognize aged faces, trying to tie them to the kids we used to play with when we were young and lived in the same town. I learned that although I might be forgettable, Becky’s not.

Our cousin Diana came up to us as we were getting out of the car at the funeral home. “Y’all traveled together?”

“Yep,” Beck said. “No sense in two cars making the trip.”

I think she should’ve stopped there, but Beck likes to explain stuff. “He’s divorced and I’m a widow and we can travel together quite well.”

“You drove up in one day?”

“No,” Beck explained. “Hotel. Two beds. Not the first time we slept in the same room, you know...”

“Yeah,” Diana said. “I remember us on pallets on the floor and all over the furniture when we were kids. It was an adventure.”

“Traveling with Brad’s still an adventure,” Beck smiled. “And it’s much better than not having somebody to talk to on a trip.”

“I’m a useful accessory,” I told Diana.

We greeted and shook hands and hugged our way through the crowd, some we knew, some we just didn’t remember, made the requisite promises to keep in touch in the future, paid our respects to the memory of a great old lady, all the typical funeral things. At least the rain held off until it was over. We made our escape late in the afternoon.

As I drove, Beck made reservations for another hotel for our trip home. One bed.

“Middle-aged guys are supposed to be slowing down, sexually speaking,” Beck said. “If you were any more capable, I think I’d burn out nerve centers.”

“Kinda what I was thinking, dear,” I returned. “I guess when I was a teen I fantasized about having a sex life like this...”

“A sex life? You fantasized about some generic sex life?”

I knew what she was getting at. “Oh, you figured in it more than you probably wanna know.”

“That’s the part we need to be careful about,” she said.

“Huh?”

“Around family. I wanted to hold your hand, for you to put your arm around me like you normally do.”

“I know. I started to do that, and then realized...”

“I know. I saw you start to move, and I stepped away.”

“Smart move.”

“Yeah,” she said. “But if we do much of this family stuff, they’ll catch on.”

“I dunno,” I said. “That ‘traveling together saves money and gives you somebody to talk to’ thing was pretty good.”