But always, a few months later, I would face again the unexplained and inconvenient absences, hoping he’d been in an accident rather than what I anxiously suspected. Then the smell of another woman on him, credit-card bills for hotel rooms, suddenly minimized computer windows, whispered telephone calls, increased drinking—the clichéd paraphernalia of adultery. A divorce. Remaking my life again, now as the single mother of two daughters.

Troy was the most stable man in her life.

“I sure don’t have the answers to relationships.” Truth is, the absolute truth, after Stephen, the men I saw wanted a commitment, but I needed a guarantee of perfection, and people don’t come that way. And my daughters came first. I wasn’t sure what to do with my life when it fell off its anticipated track other than raise them.

Men want your attention. Don’t forget this. They have problems sharing you with their own child, let alone another man’s. Their needs must be paramount. One wanted me to send Tara to boarding school. Another wanted me to leave her in the house and come live with him. She was fourteen then. “I would have loved living alone when I was fourteen,” he told me.

“Yeah, I bet. No way. No fucking way,” I answered.

I met Jim at a party, the friend of a colleague’s son. She hadn’t invited him to meet me. He was simply there. Bald, with his cuddly potbelly, and his grin. His absolute friendly warmth.

“You’re beautiful with that white hair. Shows off those bright blue eyes,” he told me.

“You’re my friend’s son’s friend!” I exclaimed, as though that made him a baby.

“Hey, I’m over twenty-one,” he said with a laugh. “Legal.” And he grabbed me to dance to Marvin Gaye, swaying into me and then spinning me away. “And like I said, you’re beautiful and sexy as hell. And there’s never any harm in dancing, is there?”

“Of course there isn’t.” I relaxed in his arms. “And you’re good.”

“I am at that.” He held his head back and laughed as he twirled me under his arm.

So first there was that palpable electricity and then there was the curiosity we had about each other. After the party, he came over. He told me that he had primary custody of two teenage sons. And that they were his first priority. I used to caution men about my daughters with almost the same words. “I like that. Children do come first.”

He leaned away from me. “Most women don’t understand what that means. It means what with my job and taking care of them, I don’t have much time for a relationship. Women want more time. So I haven’t been looking.” He sipped some wine and shrugged.