EIGHT

"Good morning!"

Shelagh jumped, startled by the sound of the unexpected voice in the parking lot just before seven a.m. that Wednesday morning. She glanced over her left shoulder, saw Patrick approaching, and smiled. "Good morning. You're in rather early, aren't you?"

"Actually, I'm not in at all, today. I'm going into Philadelphia for a conference, but I forgot my ID badge on my desk last night."

She nodded and said, "Well I hope you enjoy the conference."

When they reached the building, he held the door open for her, and then said, "You know Tim's been asking after you. You're not free Friday night, are you? Only for ninety minutes or so—long enough for me to do some shopping without him hanging off the cart and begging for every sweet he sees."

She let out a breathy laugh. "I'd love to, but I can't; I actually have a date."

Patrick paused mid-way through reaching out to press the elevator call button. "A date?"

She nodded proudly. "Yes. The girls here helped me get set up on one of those dating apps."

He pressed the elevator button with one eyebrow raised. "Not Tinder, I hope."

She laughed again. "No, not Tinder." She may have been rather naïve about the world of dating, but she had known enough to know that Tinder was not the place she wanted to start trying to find a boyfriend. Thankfully, Trixie and Jenny had other suggestions.

Actually, Shelagh was quite grateful for her two colleagues, whose support had been invaluable. Not only had they helped her choose which app to start with, but they had helped her fill in some details about herself and even taken a few photos of her to include on her profile, since she had very few photos of herself and Jenny had almost immediately nixed most of them as not being good enough for he dating profile. Once her account was set up, they checked in on her every few days, asking if she had any good conversations or matches and so she was able to vent about her frustrations or ask them questions; they really had been quite helpful.

"But I suppose I do need to thank you once again," Shelagh continued. "When he asked me out to dinner, I didn't feel nervous at all about saying yes!"

Though her first few days on the app had felt very overwhelming, Shelagh's comfort level grew with each subsequent day of use. Of course, not every interaction was a success. Sometimes a man would randomly stop replying to messages—if he replied at all—and some she had to unmatched with for making rude or off-putting comments, but she did find herself generally excited about the prospect. With this particular man, Benjamin, their conversation had begun with her commenting on how cute his dog looked in one of his profile pictures and branched off from there. After a few days of messaging each other intermittently, he'd asked her to dinner, and she'd agreed right away.

"Oh. Er. You're welcome." He gave her a smile as they stepped inside the elevator. Then, as the doors closed, he added, "Oh, you know it's... it's just some of these men can be rather...shit. You're not going to his home, are you?"

"Oh goodness no," she replied. She did not think she would have agreed to such a date of her own accord, but Trixie and Jenny had made a similar warning about safety that she absolutely intended to stick with. "We're meeting at the restaurant."

"And you won't go home with him?" he asked. She gave him a rather incredulous look and he let out a breathy laugh. "Right, of course not."

Finding his concern for her safety rather sweet, she told him, "My roommates will know where I am; you don't have to worry."

"Good, that's good."

When the elevator doors opened on the second floor, they both stepped out and went their separate ways. Shelagh had only taken three steps when she heard him call out, "Ah, I hope you have a nice time; be sure to let me know how it goes."

She glanced back over her shoulder and gave him a little wave saying, "Okay, thanks."

As she used her keycard to open the door to the clinic, she couldn't help but laugh slightly to herself. She was sure Patrick was just being friendly and he didn't actually want her to tell him about her date. Still, it was a sweet gesture. She appreciated that he cared enough to check in on her, especially now that their practice dating adventures was over, but she never expected them to become actual friends. It would have been too unusual especially when they clearly led very different lives.

On Friday evening, Patrick found himself in quite a state. Simply put, he was unsettled, and had been ever since he arrived home after picking up Timothy from after school care, glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall, and a singular thought popped into his mind: Is Shelagh on her date right now?

As he prepared dinner and sat with his son as they ate, that question and related ones continued to plague him. Is she at dinner now? What about now? Have they met at the restaurant? Has her date stood her up? Is she waiting alone and sad that her first "real" date didn't pan out?

When Tim questioned whether or not he was listening to a story about something that happened during recess that day, Patrick apologized and forced the thoughts away so he could listen to his son, but once the story was over, his mind began to drift once again. The questions returned to him as he was doing the dishes and throwing in a load of laundry since both he and Timothy seemed to have run out of clean socks.

With the laundry started and Tim occupied reading a comic book sent to him by his grandmother, Patrick grabbed himself a beer and tried to stand at the counter and sort through the mail that had accumulated during the week. He only made it through two letters before it felt as though ants were crawling up and down his spine; he had to move. He paced the kitchen for a moment then walked into the living room to pick up some of the toys that had been scattered around. Then he went back to the kitchen, looked at two more pieces of mail, took a sip of beer, then walked over to the refrigerator, opened it, shut it again immediately and growled to himself, "What the hell is wrong with me?"

With a heavy sigh, he rested his forehead against the cool door of the refrigerator, hoping it would shock him back to his senses. He was being ridiculous! There was no need for him to be this unsettled. Yet, every time he tried to focus on something, his inept brain tortured him with questions like, "What if Shelagh is laughing and holding hands with her date at this very moment?"

He was just feeling protective over her, he rationalized to himself. After their four practice dates, he'd grown to care for her—as a friend, of course. He didn't want her to get her heart broken by being stood up. Or to feel miserable because the man she was with was rude to her—or, worse—pressured her into going home with him because he was only interested in sex, not getting to know someone in hopes of building a relationship. After all the effort she'd gone to in order to make sure she wasn't the one causing the date to be awkward, he wanted her to succeed. Of course, he knew as well as any other person who had dated regularly, success was never guaranteed. In fact, it was failure that was almost practically guaranteed, but simply choosing to not see someone again because you were bored or lacked chemistry was far different than being actively upset by the encounter.

After moving their laundry from the washer to the dryer, he told Timothy it was time for bed. Per usual, the boy fought it a bit. He tried to negotiate his way into staying up later, but Patrick was firm. He needed to brush his teeth and wash his face and then they would read one chapter of the Dog Man series they were making their way through, and then it was time to turn out the lights.

As Patrick supervised teeth brushing and sat on the edge of his son's bed as they read, he thought he might have been finally cured of his worry for Shelagh—and he was, until the silence of the house settled over him. He went back to sorting the mail until his phone chimed with an incoming notification. He hurried over to where he'd left it on the dining table only to discover that, disappointingly, it was only the notice of the automatic payment of his cell phone bill.

He frowned at the device, where the time 8:37 displayed on the lock screen. It was after eight-thirty. Was it possible she was still at dinner? He knew that she liked to eat early because she had mentioned it one time. She explained that because she often started work earlier than seven a.m., she liked to be in bed no later than nine-thirty to lessen the agony of her five-a.m. alarm. Due to her earlier-than-usual bedtime, she also typically ate her final meal of the day earlier than usual as well. While he supposed she might be more flexible when going on a date—and when she would not be working the following morning—eight-thirty was generally a bit late to just be starting dinner.

Deciding it was likely her meal was over or at least finishing up, he thought about his next dilemma: should he ask her how it went that night? Or should he wait until the following day? Texting the next day seemed the more reasonable and friend-like thing to do, so that was probably what he should do, but…on the other hand, how was he going to relax that evening if he didn't ask her?

"You're being ridiculous," he muttered to himself. He needed a distraction.

Pocketing his phone, he walked over to sit on the couch. He picked up the medical journal he'd been making his way through and started on the next article. He read a few sentences and then began to unconsciously reach for the phone in his pocket. As his fingers touched the smooth glass surface, he yanked his hand back and gripped onto the pages tightly with it. He was not going to succumb to his desire to text her—he wasn't!

Ten minutes later, Patrick had barely read more than a paragraph from the journal and threw it down on the end table with a huff. He raked his fingers back through his hair and leaned back on the couch, staring up at the ceiling. After thinking for a few moments about why he was so fixated on Shelagh being on a date, he decided that his concern was not really on Shelagh so much as it was on the concept of dating itself.

Since taking full custody of Timothy in June, Patrick had only been on a few dates, all of which were rather miserable. He hadn't properly dated a woman since early spring, part of which was because of his self-imposed restriction on dating in the initial wake of Marianne's death. He knew that his complete focus needed to be on his son, and he did not want to jeopardize any of that by splitting his focus on a succession of casual relationships. It was during his practice dates with Shelagh that he realized that he and Tim probably had a stable enough footing for him to consider dating again. He simply hadn't decided the best way of going about it.

Hiring a babysitter to watch Tim on a Friday or Saturday night so he could go to a bar or another place with his colleagues felt…wrong somehow. Even when he was going out with Shelagh, he'd come home to dishes in the sink or laundry that needed done, all of which needed his attention. He'd never completely neglected household chores, but he would have let them slide a bit more while living alone. With Timothy, however, he wanted to make a good impression. He considered hiring his house cleaner for a second day of the week but wasn't sure if that was the right solution either. Tim was getting old enough that he could begin to help with those tasks and Patrick did not want him having the attitude that someone they hired could do it instead. That was something he had picked up while living with his grandparents and it had made him rather ungrateful until living in the boys' dormitory during undergrad had shocked him back to reality.

Deciding that dating again would be the solution to his frustrations, he pulled his phone out of his pocket and searched through the app store for a dating app. After downloading it and entering his email address, his first task was to upload a picture of himself with his phone. With a huff of breath, he scrolled back through his camera roll, finding mostly pictures of Tim, and a few selfies with the both of them together. He paused his scrolling with his thumb hovering over a photo he'd taken over the summer with Tim standing up on a piece of playground equipment and Patrick standing in front of him, both of them grinning.

As he did not think it was appropriate to include pictures of his son's face on a dating app profile for anyone to see, the picture would have been a good choice. Since their heads were not at the same level like they were in most of their joint pictures, it would have been quite easy to crop the boy's face out of the photo and be left with just part of his stomach and hip in one corner, but was that really what Patrick wanted to do? Cropping Tim's head from the picture felt like some sort of dark metaphor.

When he shared only partial custody of his son, Patrick did not often talk about him on his dates. If asked directly if he had children, he never lied, but he also rarely volunteered the information early on. He wasn't trying to hide the boy, of course, but as he never really thought of these women as having the potential to be long-term girlfriends, he didn't want to complicate things with details that wouldn't matter in a few weeks after he ended things with them.

Now, that had changed and he needed to be up front about his single parent status, perhaps not within the first ten minutes of chatting with someone new, but very early on. He also briefly thought about when he might allow a date to meet his son. Certainly not before a few months of dating, once he was sure she would at least be a semi-permanent figure in his life, but was he ready for that level of change to his dating life? Was he ready to consider marriage again so that his son had more stable parental unit than he ever did? In that moment, he truly wasn't sure, and decided it was best he stay off apps until he was more certain about what he wanted.

After closing the dating app, he placed the phone on the couch beside him, but hesitated before picking up the journal once more. In addition to working hard to being the best father he could be, he also wanted to work harder to be a better friend, and not let so many relationships slip through the cracks as he had when he was busy with his emergency medicine career. With that in mind, he picked up the phone again and opened his text conversation with Shelagh. He typed out the simple message, "Hope your date went well," and then put the phone aside. There, he'd done it; he'd been a concerned friend but not one that was too concerned. Now, it was up to her when to respond and he was fine with whenever that response came—if it came. Of course she did not owe him a recap of her date or anything else for that matter.

Five minutes later, just as his focus was solely on the article in front of him, his phone chimed, and he jumped. He reached out to get it so quickly that he actually knocked the phone onto the ground. He scrambled to pick it up from the rug and then failed to enter his correct passcode twice due to how wildly he was typing. With a deep, calming breath, he slowly typed in the code and opened up Shelagh's message.

It wasn't great. He only talked about his job and then insulted the waitress

Patrick frowned as he typed out, I'm sorry

It's all right. At least I wasn't nervous! have a good night

you too

He put the phone back on the couch cushion and reached down to pick up the magazine where it had fallen against his feet. Settling back into reading again, he felt a certain lightness in his chest that felt strangely like…relief?

Well, that certainly wasn't very kind of him. He didn't want Shelagh to have a bad date—he was simply relieved it didn't go horribly. Yes, that was it. Having a slightly disappointing time probably was one of the better outcomes that could have been expected for Shelagh's first date with a man she met on a dating app. Hopefully, this would be a lesson for next time and hopefully that date would go well for her. That was, after all, what he wanted; for her to be happy.