I WAS GOING TO THE PARK ONE DAY...

Alice ran up and gave Frasier a hug. He smiled and spun her around. After she was back down on the ground, she turned to Jess. "A puppy!" she exclaimed joyfully. Jess yipped and tried to jump on her, and Alice giggled, sitting on the ground to play with the young canine.

Frasier sat beside Roz on the bench. "It appears two new friends have met."

"Yeah," Roz smiled.

Without thinking, Frasier put his arm up on the top of the bench and, incidentally, behind Roz. He hadn't thought anything of his arm-on-the-back-of-the-chair action; it was a manly impulse that was next to impossible to fight. It took only a few moments for Frasier to register his close proximity to Roz, and as soon as he did his pulse started to speed up. Wondering what had come over him, he cleared his throat and began talking to ease his nervousness.

"How are you doing, Roz?"

She turned her head slightly to look at him. She thought about answering it simply, 'Fine,' but she knew he wanted something more than that. "I'm in just about as big of a rut as you are," she answered shortly.

"Where are we going wrong?"

Roz shrugged. "I've been asking myself that for years."

Frasier's eyes twinkled. "You've been asking yourself where we have been going wrong?"

"No," she stressed, looking a trifle annoyed. "I've just been wondering why my relationships always go sour."

"You ever think that maybe we've just been looking in the wrong places?" the psychiatrist asked, eagerly scooting just a little closer toward his producer. "What if what we've been looking for has been underneath our noses all along?" Frasier Crane was now feeling a trifle mischievous, perhaps so as to cover the strange pounding of his heart, and he asked, "Roz, would you go on a date with me tonight?"

Roz stared at him, feeling her blood start to surge heavily through her veins. What?

Frasier was asking her to go on a date with him? Didn't he remember the disaster when they had sl—

"Are you out of your mind?" she asked, her voice sounding incredulous. But a trickle of something else made it into her words...

"Oh, come on, Roz! Don't tell me you have other plans?" he challenged. She didn't have any plans, and he knew it, and he knew she knew he knew it.

Roz tried to grasp at some worthy excuse, but then she saw her daughter playing with Frasier's new puppy. Her excuses were now half-hearted, only for the sake of show. "But Alice—"

"Call a baby-sitter."

"But Jess—"

"Is perfectly fine at home by herself in her pet taxi. In fact, she could stay and play with Alice, if you'd like."

"But—"

"We'll have dinner at my place. Seven o'clock. I'll come by to pick you up and drop off Jess, complete with half of PetCo's supply."

Roz stared at him blankly. "Half of PetCo's supply?"

"Yes. It seems my father believes that a pet requires more material belongings than a mere human."

"Uh huh." Roz shifted her head to gaze at her daughter. What had she gotten herself into?