Page 13 of Scouting the Single Dad

“Duh.”

“She’s red,” I say. “Clifford?”

“Too obvious.”

“Fireball?”

She gives me a side glare. “Isn’t that alcohol?”

“Ketchup?”

Benny grins. “Love it.”

We leave the city behind for a two-lane highway that curls like ribbon along hillsides. Every now and then the mist thins and we get a full hit of green and russet and gold so intense it’s like someone turned the saturation up on the world.

The complete opposite of the stark landscape we left behind in Arizona.

Benny presses her forehead to the window and says “Whoa” to the passing forest.

I let the quiet stretch. Whenever there’s quiet, my brain goes to the day she arrived. Hospital lights that buzzed; my hands so unsteady they wouldn’t let me cut the cord; a nurse talking in calm, even tones while the world rushed around me like water going down a drain.

Eve, Benny’s mom, never opened her eyes again after that, and it’s been . . .

Just me and Benny ever since.

People still ask if I’m dating. If I’ll get married. If I think Ben needs a woman in her life that isn’t her grandmas or the wives of my buddies.

I never know how to say, This life isn’t about me anymore. It’s about a girl who didn’t ask to be the only child—one without a mom.

So we keep our circle small and our curtains thick and our life private where it counts. She gets to be a kid. I get to be her dad. That’s the deal, end of the fucking story.

“Dad?” Benny says, soft.

“Yeah, Bean?”

“You’re making the face.”

“What face.”

“The one Grandma calls ‘storm cloud.’”

I exhale. “Just thinking.”

“About my mom?”

“Yeah.”

She nods. We’ve had this conversation a thousand times. “Do you think she’d let me eat a caramel apple the size of my head?”

“She would’ve brought carrots and made you eat a few of them first.”

Benny smiles sideways. “She sounds smart.”

“The smartest.”

I have no idea what kind of a mother Eve would have been; we’d been dating six months, were broken up when she found out she was pregnant. Two kids in college. I was playing for a Big Ten school and shortly after Benny was born, I’d gone through the draft.

Truth is, I hardly knew Eve. I can only imagine she would have been loving and patient, but . . .