Dating for Two

Erin stared at him. “Why did you just do that?” she asked with a laugh.

“Do what?”

“Lowered your voice before saying ‘Tex.’”

The second she said it, he realized she was right. He’d lowered his voice automatically, the way he would have if he were talking about Jason with the boy close by. Steve had no choice but to laugh at himself and the situation.

“Because now you have me acting as if that puppet of yours is actually real,” he confessed.

She took it as a compliment in part and smiled her thanks. “Then I guess I do owe you that explanation. I created Tex to keep me company. When the doctor diagnosed me with cancer, I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was scary enough to frighten my poor mother. She tried not to let me see, but she did a lot of crying. Then someone told my dad about that famous children’s hospital in Memphis. My mother lost no time in getting me in. My dad stayed back home working while my mother flew out with me.

“The people there were all very kind,” she recalled with fondness. “But treatment is a long, frightening process when you’re a little kid. I missed my friends back home. They sent messages and we stayed in contact for a few weeks, but that didn’t last long and little by little, it stopped.” She shrugged, avoiding his eyes. “I felt like they forgot all about me. I wanted a friend who would always be there for me whenever I was scared or lonely—my mother told me I would never be alone as long as I had my imagination.”

“Smart lady,” he commented.

Erin smiled. “She is—when she’s not being a mother hen. Anyway, I was really into dinosaurs, so I created Tex. At first he was just one of my thick green socks that I drew a face on with a laundry marker. Then my mother got some green felt, and I bought sequins and pillow stuffing in a craft store. I sewed him by hand at my bedside and drew in his features.” She smiled as she remembered the early prototype. She still had him locked away in a box in her closet. “Tex wasn’t very pretty but he was very, very loyal, which was all I wanted.

“I held on to him when they took me in for my treatment sessions.” Despite the amount of time that had passed, the memory was still very vivid in her mind. “And he never left my side no matter how sick I got. After a while, I really did start thinking he was real. Since I couldn’t go anywhere, I created some fantastic adventures for us in my head. All that helped get me through some of the darker times,” she told him, trying to make the whole experience sound less of an emotional roller coaster than it actually had been. After all, she wasn’t trying to elicit his pity just to fully answer his question.

“After I miraculously got better, I started to think about other kids who had to go through what I did. Other kids who might have felt abandoned, lonely and scared. I wanted to help them get through it, just the way Tex helped me. That desire never left me, so while I was still in college, I came up with the idea of creating a whole line of stuffed dinosaurs that didn’t do anything but look loving. And with each stuffed toy, I’d include a little book of adventures that the toy and the child who got that toy would have. I donated the first hundred I made to a local hospital’s children’s wing.”

He could easily see her doing that. He had clients who would have had heart failure over the mere suggestion of giving away their product like that. She had an extremely large heart, he couldn’t help thinking.

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