Chapter 1

Bob had a sister and two brothers and, while all of them got married and had kids, he never did. It wasn’t that he wasn’t interested in women. He was plenty interested. But he never seemed to run into a woman who he felt so strongly about that he’d give up all the others and become a one-woman man.

That was all fine and good when he was in college and young and buff and lots of women found him attractive. Add a dozen or so years, though, and he suddenly found himself in a world where the hot women (his age) were all married and he was living a life more like a monk than a stud.

He didn’t complain about it, though. If he was a monk he was a randy, naughty one. You see, it turned out that when you’re at the top of your class and get an IT degree from a technical college, that college might hire you to work on their equipment. That seems counterintuitive until you realize actual work is way below the pay grade of the instructors (as they see it) and you don’t want less-than-fully-trained students working on your very important IT infrastructure. So Bob was on contract to do upkeep on the school’s equipment. He wasn’t a staff member, so he got to flirt with all the coeds as much as he wanted. It also turned out that some young women recognized that an older man (relatively speaking) can offer certain advantages to a girl “on the prowl” who isn’t looking for a committed relationship. Not at that point in her life.

To be clear, “girls who go wild” still expect to eventually find a guy closer to their age to hook up with for the purpose of having children and making a home and all that. But that’s in the future, and getting involved with men their age can often lead to commitment issues they aren’t ready to face, yet. Some of them are, however, more than willing to get their itch scratched by a guy who’s eight or nine years older than they are, and whose stomach isn’t so flat anymore ... and who doesn’t care about commitment.

Those young women were wrong, though. Bob did want to find a life mate he could grow old with. He was just very picky about making sure he chose the right woman. Assuming he ever ran into her. He knew he was fortunate to get the attention of hot, young girls, who wanted to play bedroom games, and sure, he knew that the fact that a few of those horny young women would come back for seconds or thirds meant they liked him, but as soon as anything close to serious feelings developed they ran for the hills.

Basically, he was alone. Basically, he was lone-ly.

Which was why Bob Carpenter masturbated a lot. And by a lot, I mean twice a day, most days, unless he had a date with one of those hot girls.

Masturbation is insidious, in that it is easy, quick, and uncomplicated, and the variety of women you can think about while you do it is infinite. It’s easy to get into the habit of jerking off, rather than going to the effort to get a real woman in bed. There are men who actually get to the point of “Who needs women? I got everything I need on the end of my arm.”

The problem with all that is that humans need interpersonal relationships in their lives, even if those are short term and complicated. We need the closeness that brings hugs and kisses and all that. That’s why having a ton of Facebook friends doesn’t replace having one or two you can sit with and be close to on a physical level.

And that brings us to the thing that happened between Bob and Erica. Erica was his niece, his sister-in-law’s daughter. Erica had three brothers, all older than she was, and they’d made her life tough. Erica was just fourteen, at the point where things between Bob and her changed.

The changes weren’t obvious, at first. Julie had married Bob’s brother, Paul. While still in high school Paul popped the question and, just after they graduated, Julie’s parents moved to a retirement complex. Her mother had early onset Alzheimer’s and her father insisted on being with her to help care for her. So Julie was given the family home, which was good for them because it was paid for, a big plus to a young couple starting out in married life. Not that they were married, yet. Paul had his life all mapped out in a way that would allow him to get married and support his wife. He joined the Marine Corps as soon as he was out of high school. Julie was already pregnant when he graduated from Marine boot camp and they had one of those ornate military weddings, with the tunnel of swords and all that. Bob was a year younger than Paul and, of course, knew Julie because his brother had dated her for almost a year. He was Paul’s best man. One of Paul’s classmates also stood up with him at the wedding. While Paul went off to be a Marine, Julie stayed there, in the house.

A year later, when Bob got his high school diploma, he stayed in town, too. He went to the local technical college and learned all about computers and web design. He was the star pupil and the college recruited him as soon as he got his degree (from them) to keep their computer infrastructure and web site up to snuff. He bought a house cheap that had been repossessed by a bank. It was run down, but in a nice part of town, about five blocks from his brother and sister-in-law’s house.

That turned out to be important, because for the next twelve years, while Paul was off “meeting interesting people and killing them”, as he loved to quip, Bob was around to help with Chad, their first child and then twin boys named Robby and Randy, and finally a cute little girl named Erica.

Then a sniper killed Paul in Afghanistan.

Bob shared Julie’s grief, and made a point of being available to her for whatever was needed. Mostly that was riding herd on the kids while Julie dealt with all the red tape that results when a person dies.

As time went on Chad made some spending money by mowing Bob’s lawn and raking his leaves and those kinds of chores. When Chad became a senior, and was involved in varsity sports, he was no longer interested in wanting Bob to hire him. Robby and Randy, the twins, were juniors but had no interest in mowing lawns and such. Erica was thirteen at this point, and to be honest, Bob didn’t consider asking her if she was interested in replacing her older brother’s efforts.

If you were to look at Julie and Erica standing side by side you wouldn’t think they were related. Julie’s body was lush and she was athletic. She played softball when she was young and still had that buff-but-feminine physique that draws a man’s eye. She was obviously highly-sexed, too, since she got pregnant even before she married Paul and then started popping out babies at a prodigious rate.

Erica, on the other hand, was thin, with no hips and flat as a board. Even at fourteen she was willowy and when men looked at her, they thought “cute” rather than “young woman with sexual potential.” She wasn’t, however, a fainting damsel in distress. With three older brothers tormenting her on a fairly constant basis, she was tough and wiry, with muscles that didn’t show through her smooth skin. She was definitely a tomboy, but never good enough at sports that she got respect from her brothers.

Whether it was because Julie told them to “watch out for” their little sister, or whether it was just instinct, they “protected” their sister like the Taliban protects its women. They loved her and cared about her, but their paternalistic behavior towards her was stifling. Even Bob saw that, but he didn’t worry about it because she was just a little girl.

That behavior, however, played a substantial part in why her relationship with Bob became so important.

When Paul died Bob became the rock Julie needed to lean on for the first year or so. Chad was twelve at the time and he tried to become “the man of the house” but he was way out of his depth. Losing his father was traumatic enough. He didn’t want to lose his support systems, too, which meant that his teammates at school became more important than they had been. The twins were just kids, too, and had their own difficulties in processing the death of their father. Erica was almost ten, and her father’s death set her adrift in the ocean that was the world. Julie threw herself into supporting the kids, emotionally, and that mission was probably what saved her from depression. Bob wasn’t a professional, but that’s what he thought.

Bob’s role in all this was to help out, but mostly to just be there. Paul’s job had kept him away from home a lot, so not having an adult male around was something they were all used to, on one level. Bob had filled that role, too - adult male role model - but he didn’t try to take Paul’s place. Still, he spent a lot of time with the kids both before and after Paul died. He was there to do things with the kids, mostly, and take their minds off of things for a little while. Julie had a lot to do in terms of legal issues, notifications, taking his name off of credit cards, bank accounts and car titles, and a dozen other things, so he kept the kids busy while she took care of all that. Later, he was just an adult male they could talk to if they needed someone. That included Julie, who thought of him as “brother” rather than “brother-in-law.”

A significant event during all of this was Paul’s burial. That might seem like a “Duh” thing to say, but when they presented the flag to Julie and the coffin was lowered into the cold ground, the group hug that they all shared made instant bonds that were still strong as steel. The six of them became one unit.

As the years passed, the boys were nicer to their sister, but “nicer” is still a relative term. What should be said is that they cared more about her on a conscious level than they had in the past. She was still excluded from joining the boys in their sports pursuits, but that was a function of latent misogyny rather than a logical assessment of her talent and ability. Why Julie never got her into girls’ softball was unclear. Maybe, as a single mom of a bunch of teenagers, she had too much to do to think about that. Maybe it was because the boys’ pursuits didn’t need much supervision or time on her part. Being a softball mom, on the other hand, takes a lot of time.

Erica tried hard to rise to the level where her brothers would include her, and that’s where Bob came in. He exchanged tosses of the football with her, and got one of those basketball goals that’s portable, in theory. Once you fill the base with sand and water it becomes almost impossible to move, but that didn’t matter because he put it on the side of his driveway. He lowered the basket to eight feet and Erica spent hours shooting hoops with him. They went running together, too. Julie had kept running as part of her private physical fitness regimen, but she was one of those runners who doesn’t play well with others while engaged in that pursuit. She liked to set her own pace, and if she ran with anyone else she had to speed up (rarely) or slow down (usually) and she didn’t like that. Bob, on the other hand, only ran because Erica loved to run. She ran circles around him, literally, but she didn’t mind because she talked nonstop while she was doing it. His side of those conversations consisted mostly of grunts because he needed all the air in his lungs just to keep going.

Erica is why he didn’t go to fat as he got older. He didn’t love it at the time, but he knew it was good for him. More importantly, it was good for her.

They talked while they shot hoops, too, and while they sat on his porch drinking lemonade during breaks. The twins were never interested in mowing his lawn, like their older brother had. They were into video games and soccer and were inseparable. When Erica asked if she could earn money by mowing his lawn, she was still almost too light to muscle the mower around the yard, but she set her mind to it and, at thirteen, became his gardener.

All this is to establish (again in a long-winded kind of way) that Erica and Bob were buddies, who could (and had) talk about anything. They had this free and easy relationship that was comfortable and important to both of them. They spent a lot of time together and Bob was intimately aware of all her trials and troubles. Most of those were little things, from an adult’s perspective, but Bob knew how serious they were to her, so he gave her advice, and they assessed together how good that advice was. Assuming she followed it, of course.

Bob knew, for example, that the girls in her class made fun of her because she didn’t even need to wear a training bra. Julie had gotten her one, but Bob thought it was more from a sense of motherly duty than any real need. Erica had bumps, rather than breasts. That was her own assessment, by the way, and not his. Her “friends” all had bulging breasts and rounded hips and Erica had neither. Some of those girls looked like they were sixteen or older. That was Bob’s assessment, by the way.

Up to the point that this is all getting to, Bob was like other men when he looked at Erica. She was “cute” rather than “a young woman with sexual potential,” as mentioned before. She had big eyes, a pug nose, a spray of freckles across that nose, and an almost dainty appearance. She didn’t act “dainty” of course, but that’s how she looked to someone who didn’t know her.

Then one day not long after her fourteenth birfthday, she appeared on his doorstep and he could tell she was depressed. It was summer, and her only comment when she drifted in through his door, was, “You got anything I can do to make some money?”

“How much money do you want to earn?” Bob asked.

“I don’t know. How much does makeup cost?”

“Isn’t that something you should ask your mother?” Bob suggested.

“Mom doesn’t wear much makeup. She doesn’t need it,” was Erica’s reply.

“And you think you do?”

This was curious. Erica had never seemed to be interested in “girly” things before.

“Why don’t boys notice me?” she asked, abruptly.

“Why do you think they don’t?” Bob asked.

“Why do you always answer my questions with another question?” she growled.

“I’m just trying to get enough information to figure out exactly what we’re talking about,” he said, grinning.

“What we’re talking about is that boys slaver over Cindy Thompson and Emma Parks and Cathy Richardson, and nobody even leers at me,” she complained.

“And you want boys to leer at you?” he said.

“When they hang around those girls the guys all get boners,” said Erica, frankly. “Nobody ever got a boner for me.”

Bob was shocked. While the array of things Erica and he had discussed was wide and deep, there had never been anything along these lines. Sure, he knew her friends were mean about her physique, but he thought of that as normal childhood cruelty, rather than a comment on her sexuality.

“I think this conversation needs lemonade,” he said. Their deepest, most important discussions seemed to take place while they were sitting on the porch with lemonade.

“I don’t want to make a big deal out of this,” she complained. “I just want to know why boys don’t notice me.”