Page 60 of The Summer of ’98

She was such a kind woman. “Are you looking forward to going home, though? Missing Mom?”

“Yeah,” I felt as if I was lying when I said that. I guess I did miss Momma, but it wasn’t a desperate sort of miss. I was quite content here. “I’m looking forward to getting started on my correspondence course too. I have so many plans for effective, affordable skincare.”

She straightened up and rested her chin in her hand. “That’s nice, honey. It’s lovely how much more accepting society is of working women today, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I was in college in the ’50s, and back then, the most common role that women had was a housewife. It was just . . . the way it was and women that were in the workforce were often secretaries. Or nurses. And I didn’t want that. I wanted to be a news anchor more than anything. More than I wanted a husband. More than I wanted children. It was very hard for a long time. I was dismissed a lot, belittled in the workplace, told time and time again that I would never get to where I wanted to be. I knew that if I got married and had children, it would put me behind in my career. So, I didn’t until I’d achieved what I wanted to achieve.”

“That’s really inspiring,” I said, in true awe of her determination.

Her gaze was distant as she smiled. “Yes. That’s how I met Jacob, actually. I was running a segment on the first ever Superbowl in ’67 and I interviewed him. It was quite immediate to be truthful. We fell in love very fast and he had an enormous amount of respect for the fact that I didn’t want to begin a family until I was older. And I was thirty-two at that time.”

“At least he supported that.”

“Oh absolutely,” Eleanor nodded and yawned again. “I wouldn’t have married him if he hadn’t. Mind you, there have been times where I’ve wondered if perhaps I did myself a dis-service waiting so long to have children.”

“How come?”

“Well, I’m sixty-four and I’ve still got a child in high school. How old will I be when Leroy and Noah decide to have children? How long will I have with my grandchildren? Sometimes I wonder if I should have tried to balance motherhood and working earlier than I did.”

There was nothing that I could say to that, so I kept quiet. As far as I was concerned, she was an inspiration. She’d worked hard to accomplish a goal that she had for herself in a time that made it very difficult for women to do so.

“Not to mention the fact that I was always so much older than the other mothers. I think that it bothered the boys a little bit. Neither of them said so, but Noah was never that eager for me to do school drop-off or pick-up. Especially as he got older and started to notice that I looked more like his grandmother than his mother. I understood, though. It didn’t upset me. Jacob, though, he got away with it—no one bats an eye at older fathers.”

We laughed at that. She wasn’t wrong but she seemed to take it in stride. The television hummed in the background, audience laughter and clapping crackling between us.

“But,” she broke the quiet with a cheerful shrug. “It is what it is. I’ve had a wonderful career, a great marriage, and good kids. I can’t complain.”

“There is that,” I said, and she smiled.

“I’ll head off to bed. These pills are doing their job. See you in the morning, sweetheart.”

“Goodnight.”

A week later, on Wednesday, the night air was hot. Stars glittered in the black blanket of the sky above us. The sound of the Red Hot Chili Peppers was coming from the kitchen window where the radio sat on the windowsill. The soft glow of the pool lights was enchanting in a subtle but spectacular way, and my feet glided through the water as I sat on the edge of the swimming pool. We’d spent the last week in a comfortable pattern. We spent time with Cass and Noah. We went to football practice, the movies, parks, the arcade. It felt as though I had been here for months rather than weeks.

Eleanor and Jacob had gone to bed, so it was a good night to be out in the yard with the music going, and we didn’t have to worry about how loud we spoke. Both of them were down for the count and Cass, Noah, Leroy, and I were in the fenced-in pool area. I adjusted the cup of my bikini and squealed when Leroy jumped in beside me.

“Babe,” I laughed as he resurfaced and shook his sopping wet hair off, drenching me while I shielded myself.

Noah stood at the deeper end of the pool and turned around, doing an impressive backflip off the edge. The water was a tepid temperature, which was nice because while the air was hot, it cooled down once we were wet. Cass lounged on a pool chair and gave Noah an encouraging thumbs-up once he appeared again.

“Come in,” Leroy didn’t give me a chance to argue—he took my hand and pulled me down from the edge. I wrapped around him as we moved through the water. “I want to take you on a date, Els.”

I clasped my hands behind his neck and wrapped my legs around his waist as he walked us around the pool. Noah was talking to Cass from the edge, but I was focused solely on the most handsome man that I had ever had the pleasure of knowing. “That’d be cute,” I agreed, eager to go on a proper grown-up date with him.

“How about The Chateau?” He stared up at me through his thick lashes, the glow of the pool lights casting a luminous blue hue on his profile.

“Is that the five-star spot that we passed leaving the movies the other night? The one that looks like one in which I couldn’t afford to use the toilet, let alone eat?”

“We can go wherever you want, Els. But you deserve to be wined and dined—I would love to treat my girl.”

“You treat me every single time you look at me like that.”

“Like what?” he asked, beads of water gathering on the tips of his hair.

“Like I’m the only girl in the world.”

---