Getting Back In the Game

I open the sliding glass door and step through into the back yard, blinking a little in the light of a bright Saturday morning. My daughter Lily, the light of my life, is playing in the swimming pool with her six closest female friends. They all graduated from high school yesterday, and this is their celebration—an all-weekend party at our house. They talked about taking a graduation trip together, and I offered to help them, but they decided collectively they’d rather celebrate here because they didn’t want to leave me alone.

Six years ago, my wife Rowan died. It was completely unexpected, and completely unnecessary. She had some hereditary issues with her arteries and got involved with a clinical trial for a new wonder ; it liquified her liver. It . . . there are no words to describe my grief. I’m good at words and emotional processes; I’m a family therapist, the senior partner in a highly-respected practice. I still don’t have any words for that. Rowan was my emotional foundation, and just like that, she was gone.

If it hadn’t been for Lily, I think I would have folded. I couldn’t, because I couldn’t do that to her. I had to keep going for her sake, and so I did—one foot in front of the other, one damned thing after another. I took a leave of absence from my practice and did everything I could to protect the two of us so we could grieve as we needed to. We were always close, but we got a lot closer during those months. I didn’t go back to work until I was sure we were both up to going back to the normal grind. My partners understood; their main concern was that we take the time we needed. It’s the same as major surgery, in a way: you don’t put major stress on the wound until it’s healed enough to take the stress without rupturing again.

I did go back to work, and Lily and I did set about building a new normal. For years, other than work, she was my world. I didn’t date, and didn’t want to. Inevitably, I would have compared any woman to Rowan, and it would have been hard to find anyone who could have survived the comparison.

Rowan was brilliant and creative, a painter whose gallery shows did very well and a poet who was published in major magazines (even, once, The Atlantic); her lightning intuition and gift for seeing things from a different angle from everyone else played very well off my analytical approach to life, and her spontaneity did much to balance my tendency to overthink and overplan things. She was also a loving and supportive wife, my biggest encourager, and a sexual firecracker. I always had her back, and she always had mine—and when we were alone, she usually had my cock. We made a fantastic team.

We had to. We started dating in junior high and got married right after we graduated high school, because we were each other’s ticket out—out of town, out of our families’ clutches, out. We put ourselves through college, then me through graduate school; Lily came along that first year in grad school, which made things tough, but we managed. We would have liked to have another child or two, but we’d known when we married that we’d have a hard time getting pregnant, and we felt blessed to have her. On the positive side, we never had to worry about birth control. I went into practice and got my doctorate, Rowan caught a lucky break with her painting, and our life gradually took the shape we wanted. Foolish me, I thought it would stay that way; I was utterly unprepared when it ended.

After several years, I had finally moved on enough to try dating; I could accept that none of these women would ever be Rowan and appreciate them for who they were. Nothing ever clicked, though. I didn’t quite give up, but . . . well, I more or less gave up.

Lily was there to support me and keep me company, and by the time she hit high school, so were her friends. I would be amazed that anyone could have so many—I’m a confirmed introvert, though many people find that hard to believe—except that her mother was the same way. The group changed somewhat over the years, but the same seven girls were always at the center: Lily, Abby Daniels, Bailey Rivers, Isabella Moncada, Jessica Wolff, Meaghan Byrne, and Scarlett Kerr. Their boyfriends came and went, and there were boys who were consistently part of the friend group, but those girls were always there, which usually meant they were here—and they adopted me as sort of the den father or group dad or something, and made it their mission to take care of me as much as they could.

When I say they were usually here, I’m not kidding. I make a really good living, and Rowan was the darling of the art critics, so her gallery shows brought in a lot of money—and her brother is an investment banker. When she died, the amount we received for the wrongful- suit would have been almost indecent, except that I wanted to make those bastards bleed as much as I could, and it was clear they only bled green. That went into investments, too, since we’d always lived fairly modestly. Before Lily hit high school, though, she asked me if we could buy a new house. Partly, she wanted to make a fresh start—not that she didn’t want to remember her mother, but she didn’t want to be reminded all the time that her mother was gone. Partly, she wanted us to have a house where all her friends could hang out. I was gravely assured that none of their houses was really big enough to serve the purpose, and it would be really nice if we lived someplace where there was room for them all to enjoy themselves.

So, we moved that summer before her freshman year. It’s not a huge house—though there are three bedrooms, since I thought having a guest room would be nice—but it has a big kitchen and an open, spacious floor plan. More importantly, it’s on an acre or so of land (I bought a riding mower) and has a huge pool, plus a hot tub. By the end of September, Abby, Bailey, Isabella, Jessica, Meaghan, and Scarlett had all given their parents my cell number, and I was on their speed dial. Some weeks, I think those girls spent more time at my house than their own houses; I don’t know how many evenings they made up a nest of blankets on the floor of the back living room and all piled in for the night.

And, of course, they spent as much time as they could in and around the pool and hot tub. That could get awkward, since they wanted me out there with them as much as possible, and I haven’t really gotten laid the last six years . . . and even if I had, my body would have reacted, because those girls are all attractive. Isabella, Jessica and Scarlett are busty young women, like Rowan was (and Lily is); Jessica is shy about showing off her body and always wears a one-piece, but Isabella and Scarlett seem to compete to see who can find the tiniest bikini, and regularly seem to be on the verge of losing their suits entirely. Abby’s a basketball player, tall, athletic, and willowy, with nice curves; Bailey, who captains the cheer squad for football, is shorter and a little curvier. Meaghan, another cheerleader, is a fiery little pixie. Any one of them in a swimsuit, and especially the skimpy ones most of them prefer, would be enough to turn any man’s head; the six of them together, all of them wet from the pool, are downright unfair. I think I’ll manage to survive until they all leave Monday morning, but it may be a near-run thing.

Still, I adore all of them, and the smiles they give me whenever I join them warm my heart (and, I have to admit, certain parts lower down) more than I can express. I love seeing them having fun, and I enjoy each of them as people. They’re thoughtful, caring young women, and they’re all in for each other; they epitomize Spider Robinson’s dictum that shared pain is lessened, but shared joy is increased. (I introduced them all to the Callahan’s stories some years ago, and those stories have shaped their friendship. It’s a very good thing, except when Punday Night erupts on the pool deck or around the dining-room table.)