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Excerpt from Chapter 31: Love, Again
I was going to fly back on a Saturday morning, and with me was my one-year-old granddaughter, Sharon Gaile. We were planning on taking a cab home from the airport, and I thought, Why don't I call David and see if he'd like to pick us up. I forgot about the three hour time difference and phoned him at seven in the morning Arizona time.
"Hello…"
"David?" He sounded a little out of it.
"Yeah."
"This is Sharon…"
"Are you back in town?"
"I'm boarding a plane in Detroit right now and I'll be in about 2:15 this afternoon, and was wondering if you'd like to pick me up at the airport."
It was quiet at the other end of the phone.
"Well, I was going golfing…"
Then I heard a noise in the background. "Oh, do you have company?"
"Yeah."
Suddenly I felt sick, and asked myself why I'd called him. "I'm sorry," I said.
"I was fixing breakfast," he said.
"I'll call you later then," I said, and hung up.
The whole way home I was thinking, I wonder who's over there? I call him at 7 AM and he has company? I didn't know what to think. He called that afternoon, and I told him I was sorry for phoning him that early. He said he was looking after his three grandkids overnight and was making them pancakes when I'd called.
"Sure," I said.
"No, really."
I thought maybe a girlfriend had spent the night. I was embarrassed, and decided to never call him again. Nevertheless, we talked off and on over the next few weeks and met up at DPS Family Education Day, which was a program for police families. I was going to give a speech, and we got to know each other a little over lunch. I did most of the talking. Big surprise.
Then one day I was at the DPS training unit, and he was there, and I asked why everyone was saying "Yes Sir" to him. "Are you the boss or something?"
"I'm the Commander of Training. Do you want to see my office," he said.
Well, I was impressed. A couple of weeks later I called to see how he was. He had the flu or something and hadn't been feeling well.
"Hi, what are you doing?" I said.
"Who is this?" he said.
"Sharon."
"I'm grilling pork chops."
"You've got company?"
"Uh-huh."
"I thought you were sick."
"I am."
Not too sick for company, I thought.
"It's a friend from the office," he said.
"Don't tell him I'm on the phone, it'll be all over the office," I said. If he thought I was seeing David, he couldn't possibly resist telling everyone at DPS. And then I thought, Maybe it wasn't somebody from the office and he really had a girlfriend over, and I was interfering. In which case, I'd blown it again.
"Aren't you going to bring me chicken soup?" he said.
"I don't know you that well," I said. With or without chicken soup, I wasn't going to a single guy's house. Today he reminds me I wouldn't help him even when he was deathly ill.
After he got well, I invited him to my house for our first real date, a casual dinner for two. The night before, I had been staring at Doug's wall-the memorial or shrine I'd assembled-and it struck me all at once. If I ever wanted a future, I had to let go of the past. If I ever wanted to be healthy again, I had to let go of the pain. That was the message in the book Message In A Bottle, which I had recently read.
I got out some boxes and stayed up all night dismantling the shrine and packed everything away for the kids. One day they would probably want Doug's things in their own homes to help remember their father.
I had become so busy taking down the shrine and then rearranging the furniture to hide where it had been that I had forgotten that David was coming over. Then the phone rang. He was at the drugstore up the street, and he asked did I need anything. I jumped in the shower, and he was at my door ten minutes later. My hair was wet, and I quickly pulled on a shirt and jeans and ran to the door barefoot.
I opened the door and almost the first thing he said was, "Where's the shrine?" He'd heard about it from other officers. I told him I had taken it down. And I felt good. I felt like life had a chance.
Fortunately, I had put ribs in the oven that morning and had made a pasta salad, and while I was in the kitchen putting together our dinner, David checked out my hundreds of cows. "This cow thing is a little overdone, don't you think?" he said.
"That's pretty rude," I said.
"Couldn't you find a few more cows?" he laughed.
A few days later, I visited him at his house. He had Mexican Saltillo clay tile on the floors, and no pictures on the walls.
"A little cold, isn't it?" I said.
"That's pretty rude," he said.
It was obviously love. You don't waste time insulting somebody you don't like.
Anyway, back to our first date… After we ate I suggested we go to a movie that started in about fifteen minutes. He said he'd have to get cash at an ATM. I said never mind, I had money. It was apparent at the age of forty that I'd forgotten some of the finer points of dating, like the guy is supposed to pay. I told him to hold on while I ran a comb through my hair, and put on makeup.
Earlier I'd taken the trash bag out of the kitchen can and tied it in a knot. While I was getting ready, he asked if he could take out the trash.
I heard wedding bells.
I told David months later that from that moment on, he was doomed. A guy who volunteers to take out the trash is off the market.
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