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“Not anymore,” Marnie stated, nodding her head at me, replying to her mom’s comment about Tricia. “Our baby girl is smitten. If you’d seen the look she gave him when they first got out of the car,” she teased, sighed dreamily, and fanned herself.
“Don’t embarrass James,” her mom admonished, like my feelings counted, but Tricia’s didn’t.
“How could I be embarrassed with this elegant beauty on my arm?” I stated, moving over to Tricia. I slid my arm around her waist and pressed a kiss to her temple. Tricia glanced up at me, a smile teased at her lips. “I love your daughter very much and I’m more than delighted this precious lady feels the same.” Betty bristled where she stood, and I almost chuckled because I had defended Tricia.
As the conversation settled into small talk, I noticed Tricia began to relax. Betty, eager to make an impression, flitted back and forth carrying food from inside out to a large buffet table she had set up. Neither Tricia nor Marnie offered to help her. I noted how different and distant the girls’ relationship was with their mother in contrast to my sisters with ours.
Turning my attention to the conversation, it only took me minutes to decide Marnie was a straightforward woman who clearly loved Tricia, even if she liked getting a rise out of her. However, as a career soldier nearing retirement, she appeared somewhat battle hardened from her military life, and had no issue in calling situations as she saw them. I liked that about her and felt reassured she had a true measure of their mother. This gave me confidence Tricia would have an ally if she decided to share her story with the rest of her family.
As the day wore on, I tired of Betty’s need to impress and felt relieved when the heat of the day lured all three women into the pool, leaving Franco, Lester, and I chatting on the patio. Like any father, Lester was eager to know more about me.
“What do you do for a living again?”
Thankfully, I sounded far more respectable in my company director’s role than I would have had he asked me the same question a few years earlier, when I had no job to speak of. He appeared impressed with my response and then went on to probe my relationship with his daughter.
“You’re living together?” His mouth set in a line as he glanced questionably toward me over his half-rimmed spectacles.
“Mostly,” I replied, honestly. “We live part and part… due to work commitments,” I added.
“What does that mean?” he asked, his tone a little sharper.
“Sunday night until Wednesday night we live near my work in New York. Thursdays she comes back to New Jersey to catch up on paperwork in the office, and Friday to Sunday we stay at her place.”
“Then the answer isn’t mostly, it’s yes, with Tricia spending one night away,” he told me, frankly.
“Yes,” I confirmed, feeling stupid and snickered.
“And this arrangement will continue until when?” her dad pressed with a questioning look. Franco stood up and rubbed the back of his neck, clearly feeling awkward I was being pressed by Lester in front of him. “Gotta take a leak and make a phone call, y’all, be back in a while,” he muttered, slipping his feet into his pool shoes and heading inside the house.
“Until I ask Tricia to marry me at which time, I don’t see the situation changing. Tricia loves what she does, and I do what I do, and our situation works well for us. If Tricia wants us to have a bigger house together in New Jersey we’ll find one, if she wants a house in New York, we can do that too. I’m all for making her happy, Lester.”
For a long minute I sat quietly looking at the three women in the pool and I waited for him, knowing there would be a blowback somewhere from what I’d said.
“So you’re going to marry?” he asked, peeling his eyeglasses off his face and lowering them to his lap.
“I hope so… with your permission, of course,” I added, glad I hadn’t asked her on the boat since the opportunity had presented itself to do it in a traditional way.
Lester looked back toward the pool and I felt in that moment, Tricia was the only person he saw. Drawing in a deep breath he nodded. “You’ll treat her right. I can see what she means to you. You’ve got a look of a man who adores her… and rightly so, she’s always been adorable. She deserves the man who will worship her as his wife.”
“You’re right, I do adore her and I already worship her.”
“She’s got complex thoughts in her head, that one,” he said, thoughtfully. “You can deal with those?”
My chest tightened and for a minute I thought he knew why Tricia lived a single life. I studied him, both of us paused in time as I weighed him up and decided if he had known he’d have made no secret about that.
“I can. I love her. All of her, and everything about her,” I replied honestly. Nodding, he accepted my explanation, which in my view, hadn’t even begun to scratch the surface on how I felt about his daughter.
“Seeing Tricia settled would mean the world to me. Personally, I never thought it would happen.”
“It’s going to happen,” I confirmed. “I’ve already bought the ring,” I disclosed and winked. Lester swallowed hard and for a moment I watched as he fought gallantly with a wave of emotion that gripped him. Not wishing to embarrass him, I stared toward the pool and gave him time to catch his breath.
