Page 42 of Someone to Watch Over Me

“It’s mostly a gigantic pain in my ass, but hey, it’s a living.”

“How is it a pain?”

“How much time do you have?”

“I’ve got nowhere to be.”

“In that case… It’s always something going sideways. Materials on backorder, customers in a red-hot rush, employees who don’t show up for work or flunk a drug test, permitting offices that take forever, building inspectors who nitpick, people who don’t pay their bills… To start with.”

“Yikes. Sounds like fun.”

“The fun never ends.”

“The houses you build are gorgeous. Two of my friends from college who married each other saved for five years to buy in one of your neighborhoods.”

“Who was it?”

When she told me their names, I smiled, because they were among my favorite customers. “They’re a great couple. I loved working with them.”

“They loved working with you, too. They told me about it long after the house was done. It never occurred to me to ask what their contractor’s first name was.”

What would it have mattered? She was married then.

Hearing she was no longer married had me spun up in a way I didn’t often get. I wanted to ask her to dinner. I wanted to ask her to marry me. Haha, just kidding. Sort of.

“So, what’s your plan for this next part of your journey?”

She gave me an odd look.

“Is it okay to ask that?”

“Of course, it’s just that most people don’t ask me things like that. They ask if I miss Jim, or if I’m angry with him for getting sick and dying, or if I’m dating, or if I wish we’d had kids, or a lot of other things that are none of their business.”

“I can’t believe anyone would ask you those things.”

“They do. Theyloveto say, ‘Thank goodness you didn’t have kids.’”

“Stop it.”

“True story.”

“Oh my God. What the hell is wrong with people?”

“Is that a rhetorical question? I’m especially thankful for my Wild Widows, who keep me from losing it.”

“Wild Widows?”

“A group of young widows focused on figuring out what we plan to do with our one wild and precious life, per Mary Oliver.”

“So it’s like a support group?”

She nods. “That’s become a family.”

“I love that. Not the reason for it, but that you have each other.”

“They’ve saved my life—and my sanity. Anything that’s happening to me has also happened to one of them. It makes you feel less alone with the grief. Young widowhood is very different from the usual white-haired-widow stereotype. We often have most of our lives ahead of us rather than behind us, so it’s a unique experience that way.”

I was ashamed to admit I’d never once considered how young widowhood would be much different from the older version.

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