Dating for Two. Marie Ferrarella

shook her head. “Getting older, dear,” she replied, patting his cheek, “but that was a very sweet, ego-boosting thought on your part and I’m flattered.”

      She paused for a moment, debating something. She looked over toward Jason. The boy was lying on his stomach, ignoring everything around him and focused completely on the learning video on the monitor. His thumbs were all but flying across the controller in his hands.

      When Steve had opened the refrigerator, she’d had occasion to look in. It hadn’t been a promising picture. Which was what prompted her now to ask, “When was the last time you had a home-cooked meal?”

      “That all depends,” he replied.

      That was a strange answer, Cecilia thought. “On what?”

      Steve grinned. He would have been the first to admit that while he was very successful in his chosen field and liked to dabble in a number of different “hobbies,” cooking was definitely not among them, unless burning food could be considered a hobby.

      “On how broad a definition of the term home-cooked you mean. If you mean a frozen dinner warmed up in my home microwave, then my answer is yesterday. If, by chance, you mean something out of the oven that didn’t come out of a package from the frozen section of the grocery store, then my answer would have to be the last time my mom came to visit, three months ago.”

      Cecilia nodded. “That’s what I thought. Let me see what I can come up with,” she told him. She pushed up the sleeves of her blouse and opened the refrigerator again.

      Granted, he was hungry, but there was such a thing as imposing and he didn’t want to ruin the relationship he had with this woman. He liked talking to her.

      “I can’t have you do that,” Steve protested, stepping in front of her and attempting to close the refrigerator again.

      She cheerfully moved him aside and got back to foraging. “Consider it a bonus for being such a good client.”

      Maizie, Cecilia thought as she got down to business, was going to love this guy.

      * * *

      “What’s his name again?” Maizie asked that evening as she, Cecilia and Theresa got together.

      It was an impromptu meeting. Cecilia had called both of her best friends the second she had gotten into her car. She’d just left Steve raving about the casserole she had made out of the odds and ends that she had found in his refrigerator and his pantry. Even Jason had been moved to say something positive after being made to pause his game and come to the table to eat.

      At that point she was feeling particularly good about the plan forming in her head.

      All she needed was help from “the girls.”

      They met at Maizie’s house within the hour.

      Maizie was currently sitting in front of her laptop, ready to try to get as much information as she could about this potential candidate that Cecilia felt seemed overdue to find love again.

      “His name is Steven Kendall,” Cecilia told her, then spelled out his name carefully.

      “You know him—do you think that Steven might have a page up on Facebook?” Maizie asked, already pulling up the site.

      “I don’t know about Facebook,” Cecilia replied. “He seems friendly enough, but he is a rather private person when he’s not working.”

      “What does he do?” Theresa asked.

      “He’s a lawyer specializing in business litigation and—” Cecilia got no further.

      “A lawyer?” Maizie echoed. It wasn’t so much a question as it was a triumphant declaration. “That means he’s probably got a photo and a profile online with his law firm.”

      Pulling up a popular search engine, Maizie lost no time rapidly typing in the man’s name. She leaned back in her chair as Steve’s photograph and minibio came up on screen. She was clearly impressed.

      She emitted a low whistle and said, “Not bad, Cecilia. Not bad at all.”

      Curious, Theresa leaned in over Maizie’s shoulder to get a look at the man. “Not bad? If I were ten years younger, I’d give him a tumble myself.” She glanced up to see the skeptical, amused looks on both of her friends’ faces. “Oh, all right, twenty years,” Theresa corrected.

      “Better.” Maizie laughed. “Besides, I’ve already got someone for him,” she told Theresa as well as Cecilia. When Cecilia had called her, she hadn’t had a chance to tell either of her friends about Erin O’Brien yet, but she quickly filled in the details now.

      Finishing, she looked back at the lawyer Cecilia had brought to her attention. Her smile was wide and infinitely hopeful. “If you ask me, this seems like a match made in heaven. She’s a toymaker who loves children and he’s a widower with a child who by definition loves toys. It doesn’t get any better than this.”

      Neither of her friends disagreed. “But how do you suggest we go about bringing these two made-for-each-other people together without them knowing it was a setup?” Theresa, ever practical, asked.

      Maizie chewed on her lower lip for a moment as she gave that little problem her undivided attention. “The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer,” she said, reciting an old mantra.

      “That’s Maizie-speak for nobody goes home until we come up with a plan for them to meet,” Theresa said with a sigh, bracing herself for a long night.

      Maizie patted her friend’s hand as she rose to her feet. “You know me so well. I’ll put up a pot of coffee,” she told her friends before crossing to the kitchen.

      * * *

      Erin O’Brien hung up her phone, still a little bewildered at exactly how Felicity Robinson had gotten her name, much less her phone number. But then, she supposed in this day and age of rampant nonprivacy, anything was possible for someone with a reasonable amount of tech savvy if they were determined enough. And if there was one thing she had come away with from this conversation, it was that the assistant principal of James Bedford Elementary School certainly sounded extremely determined.

      “Guess what,” Erin said to the friendly-looking stuffed T. rex on her desk, one of several that she owned. The T. rex had been the first toy she’d ever made, and the original, now rather shabby for wear, was locked away in a safe. “We’re going back to school. Seems that somebody wants me to talk to a roomful of seven-year-olds about how I got started making toys.”

      She cocked her head, giving the T. rex a voice in her head and having him make up excuses for why they couldn’t go. The T. rex embodied her insecurities. He always had. It had been her way of dealing with them as a child.

      “Oh, don’t give me that snooty face,” she said, addressing the dinosaur. “You’re a ham and you know it. This’ll be fun, you’ll see,” she promised, using almost the same words that the assistant principal had when she’d called her.

      “Yeah, for you,” the high-pitched voice whined. “Because you’ll say anything you want through me.”

      Erin leaned over her desk and pulled the stuffed animal to her. Affectionately dubbed Tex the T. rex, the stuffed dinosaur had been her start, her very first venture into the toy world. Imagination—a positive imagination—had been her crutch, her way of dealing with all the things that had been going on in her young world when life had consisted of machines that whirled and made constant noise at different frequencies while they measured every kind of vital sign they possibly could via the countless tubes that seemed to be tied or attached to her little, sick, failing body.

      Even back then, though shy, she’d possessed an inner feistiness. She’d done her best to be brave so that her mother wouldn’t cry, but even so, Erin was firmly convinced that if she hadn’t invented Tex—her alter ego as well as her champion—when she had, she would have broken down rather than triumphed over the disease that had threatened