He left his two little girls and his wife when he learned that she was having an affair with his father. Which was worse? He didn’t know, but his response was to abandon both families — the one he was from and the one he created — and he headed north looking for work.
She was recently divorced. Well…annulled, two years ago, and needed a husband to provide for her and her two-year old son. She was clever. She volunteered at a local hospital — a twenty-year-old candy striper — with the hope of meeting a doctor, someone who could provide for her and her son and the family she wanted.
He wasn’t looking for love. He wasn’t looking for anything more than a job, which he found as a registered nurse at a local hospital. And one day, the young candy-striper met the beleaguered head nurse.
She was pretty. He was not.
He had a reliable job. She had a two-year old boy.
This is the closest they would come to a match made in heaven.
After what he’d been through, he no longer wanted kids. But the little boy was the price for a future with this pretty, young candy-striper. She made him feel better. He made her feel less alone. They both needed someone. They both were someone. Or were trying to be.
I don’t know that love ever came into it. I suppose it grew over time if it wasn’t there to begin with. Or it faded into something else if it was there to begin with.
Life’s full of surprises yet inevitable all the same.