Chapter 18

The next two weeks were busy ones. As June turned to July, I began packing for my trip to London while making the final preparations for Mason’s fifth birthday. My mom had helped me plan a family party for the Fourth of July, but I decided to take Dawn’s suggestion for what to do the day before, on Mason’s actual birthday.

“How would you like to go see some life-size dinosaurs on your birthday next week?” I asked him one morning as we played outside with his toy dinosaurs. I parked my chair at the edge of the patio while Mason crawled around in the grass at my feet, making his dinosaurs fight and chase each other up the cliffs of my legs as the pterodactyl I held in my left hand flew overhead, occasionally swooping down to snap at one of them.

Mason had the triceratops in his right hand headbutt the stegosaurus in his left before he looked up at me. “Like, for real?”

“Well, they won’t be real live dinosaurs, but they’ll look real – like statues,” I tried to explain. “There’s this place Dawn told me about called Dinosaur World. Does that sound fun?”

“Yeah!” Mason exclaimed, his eyes lighting up. “Let’s go now!”

I laughed. “Well, we can’t go right this minute. It’s too far away. I was thinking next Tuesday for your birthday. How does that sound?”

He nodded. “Okay,” he said before resuming the epic battle taking place atop my knees. The stegosaurus twisted around, whacking the triceratops with its spiked tail and sending it flying over the steep cliff. It landed on my foot, triggering a spasm.

“Oh no… earthquake!” I shouted as my leg trembled and shook.

Laughing delightedly, Mason let go of the stegosaurus, which tipped over and tumbled off my lap, too. “Earthshake!” he echoed. Leaving the two dinosaurs lying dead at my feet, he reached for his T-Rex and placed it in my right hand. “Here, Dad… you can be Sharptooth… and I’ll be Littlefoot.”

“Oh, these guys have names now?” I asked, smiling as he picked up his brontosaurus.

Mason nodded. “Like the movie I watched at Mammaw’s house.”

“Oh, yeah? What movie was that?”

He shrugged. “I dunno. The dinosaur movie.”

The only dinosaur movie I could think of off the top of my head was Jurassic Park, but I doubted my mom would have let him watch that without checking with me first. Curious, I called her later that day. “Hey, what was the dinosaur movie you watched with Mason last week?” I asked her. “He was talking about it this morning, but he couldn’t remember what it was called.”

“Oh! It was a cartoon called…” She trailed off. “Well, shoot, now I can’t remember either, but I have the box lying around here somewhere… hang on…” I heard her rummaging around in the background. “Here it is! The Land Before Time. I found the DVD in one of those five dollar bins at Walmart. I know how into dinosaurs Mason’s been lately, so I bought it for him to watch while he was staying with me. We both loved it.”

“Ohh, I know what movie you’re talking about now,” I said as my mind conjured a vague memory of cute cartoon dinosaurs. “I never saw it, but I think we did some kind of promotion for it when I worked at Pizza Hut in high school. I remember we had these little dinosaur puppets and activity books for the kids.”

“That sounds about right. It’s an older cartoon, not one of those computer-animated movies they make nowadays, but it must have come out sometime after you and your brothers were grown because I don’t remember it,” she replied. “I’ll swing by this afternoon on my way to book club and drop it off so you can watch it with Mason if you want.”

“Yeah, that’d be great, Ma. Thanks.”

“Fair warning,” she said when she brought the movie by. “I forgot to mention it earlier, but there are a few sad parts. Remember watching Bambi when you were little?”

“Yeah….” Looking down at the cheerful cartoon dinosaurs on the DVD case, I realized what she meant. “Lemme guess – the mom dies in this one, too?”

She nodded. “I didn’t know when I put it on for Mason, of course, but he handled it pretty well. Didn’t even cry. I did shed a few tears myself,” she admitted.

“Jesus…” I shook my head. “Why does every damn kids’ movie have to kill off at least one of the parents?” Mason had seen plenty of Disney films, but I had purposefully avoided showing him Bambi for that very reason.

My mom shrugged. “Honestly, I think that sort of stuff is a lot harder on the adults than it is on the kids. For them, it’s just fiction, but it hits closer to home for those of us who have actually been through it or watched our children go through it.”

I swallowed the hard lump that had risen in my throat. “Mason’s been through it, too. He just doesn’t remember it.”

“Exactly my point. That’s why I expect it’ll be more difficult for you to watch than it was for him. I just wanted to give you a heads up.”

“Well, thanks, Ma.”

As I backed away from the front door, Mason came running down the stairs. “Mammaw!” He barreled past me and practically flew into my mom’s arms.

“Hi, sugar!” She scooped him up into a hug. “I just stopped by for a minute to drop off that dinosaur movie we watched last week in case you wanna watch it again with your daddy and Dawn.”

“Yeah! Can we, Dad?” Mason asked, looking back at me.

I forced a smile onto my face. “Sure, bud. Maybe we can watch it before bed tonight,” I said, wondering if I’d made a mistake in allowing my mom to bring it over.

When Mason showed Dawn the DVD, her face split into a wide grin. “Aww, The Land Before Time! My son Michael loved this movie and its thirty-seven sequels when he was a little boy.”

“Thirty-seven sequels?” I repeated, laughing.

“Something like that.” She rolled her eyes at me when Mason wasn’t looking. “The first one’s really good, though.”

“I heard it was sad.”

“Oh, yeah, it’s really flippin’ sad, too,” she replied, nodding matter-of-factly. “You’re gonna cry.”

“Great,” I said with a groan.

“It’s okay.” She clapped me on the shoulder. “It’s healthy to have yourself a good cry now and then. Helps get all those feelings out, so they don’t fester inside you.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

After dinner, the three of us gathered on the couch to watch the movie. For a late-eighties animated film I had somehow never seen, it was better than I’d expected, with beautiful music to accompany the story. But Dawn hadn’t been lying: just twenty minutes in, Littlefoot’s mother lay dying in the middle of a rainstorm, and a flood of tears was streaming down my face.

As the wounded dinosaur said her last words to her son, I looked over at Mason, who sat in the middle of the couch between Dawn and me. He stared at the screen, his mouth hanging half-open, his eyes wide but surprisingly dry. As I wrapped my arm around him, hugging him closer to my side, he glanced up at me. “Are you sad, Daddy?” he asked.

I nodded, not even trying to hide my tears. “Are you?”

He imitated my action, bobbing his head up and down. “Littlefoot’s momma died… like mine did,” he said solemnly. “Is that why you’re sad? ‘Cause you miss Mommy?”

“Yeah, buddy,” I croaked as my throat threatened to close. “I’ll always miss your momma.” But it was much more complicated than that. Of course, I thought of Kristin and how she’d never gotten a chance to say her goodbyes. I couldn’t help but empathize with poor Littlefoot as he wallowed in his grief, knowing exactly what he felt like on multiple levels. I was both a son who had lost a parent and a person who had lost someone he loved and expected to be with for the rest of his life. But, as a parent myself, I also identified with Littlefoot’s mother, who had died trying to protect him. I would gladly give my life for my son’s, but the thought of leaving him an orphan terrified me.

I looked over the top of Mason’s head at Dawn, who had experienced the opposite: the loss of a child. A parent’s worst nightmare. She was wiping away tears, too. When she caught me looking at her, she glanced back at me with watery eyes, giving me a sheepish smile and an apologetic shrug, as if to say, “I told you so.”

“I hate you,” I mouthed back, shaking my head, then winked to show I was kidding. Despite it draining every last drop of moisture from my tear ducts, I didn’t hate the movie either. At least it had a happy ending. “Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were the executive producers of this?” I asked in surprise as the credits rolled over a beautiful animated background and accompanying Diana Ross song. “No wonder it was so good.”

“So you liked it?” said Dawn, smiling.

“Yeah, I did,” I replied, wiping my eyes with my knuckles. “You were right, though – it was really friggin’ sad.”

“Yeah… even more so than I remember,” she admitted, motioning toward her own red eyes. “I hadn’t seen it since Michael was little. It definitely hits differently now.”

I nodded, understanding what she meant. I felt the same way about movies I’d watched with my dad and with Kristin.

“Were you crying, Dawn?” Mason asked curiously, looking closely at her blotchy face.

“Yup, I sure was. But I’m all right now,” she reassured him. “You about ready for bathtime and bed?”

“Do I have to?” he whined, turning back to look at me with pleading eyes.

“Yeah, you do, bud,” I replied. “Do you want Daddy to help you with your bath tonight?”

Mason seemed to consider this for a second. “Can I have bubbles?”

“Of course.”

“Then, yes!” he said excitedly, jumping up from the couch.

Dawn chuckled. “Why don’t you go on upstairs and get undressed while I help your dad back into his chair? He’ll be up in a minute.”

“Okay!” Mason raced out of the room as Dawn rolled my wheelchair over.

Once I was strapped into it, I took the elevator to the second story, where Mason was waiting for me in his bathroom. When he was younger, Dawn had always been the one to give him a bath – I’d heard horror stories of toddlers drowning in just an inch or two of water and didn’t trust my ability to bend down and pull him out of the tub if his face suddenly went under. But now that he was almost five, Mason was mostly independent when it came to bathtime.

We made a great team, working together to draw his bath. He turned on the water while I used the inside of my wrist to test the temperature, telling him which way to twist the handle to adjust it until the water was warm without being too hot. I let him squirt a liberal amount of bubble bath into the running water before he turned off the tap, then rolled my chair right up to the edge of the tub as he climbed in.

Mason spent the first few minutes playing with the bubbles, putting piles of foam on his face so that he looked like Santa Claus with a big, white beard. Then, as the bubbles began to disperse, he took one of his toy boats out of the basket hanging across the end of the tub and let it sail around in the water.

I wet a washcloth and used the pump dispenser to squirt some body wash into it. Folding it in half, I rubbed the washcloth between my hands to lather up the soap before I began washing Mason’s back. As I ran the cloth over his shoulder blades, I cleared my throat. “Hey, buddy, there’s something I wanna talk to you about. You know how, earlier, when we were watching the movie, you asked me if I miss Mommy?”

He nodded, not looking at me, his eyes still focused on the little tugboat in front of him.

“Well, I do miss her very much – and I will always love her,” I went on, wiping a smudge of dirt off the back of his neck while his head was down. “But I also don’t wanna be lonely for the rest of my life. So, what would you think if I were to date another woman?”

Mason looked up. “You mean Dawn?”

I laughed, taken aback by his reply. “No, not Dawn. I’m talking about a different woman – someone new that you’ve never met. How would you feel about me having a girlfriend?”

He did a double take, his eyes widening on the word “girlfriend.” Then he started to giggle.

“What’s so funny?” I asked with a grin, leaning forward to dip the washcloth beneath the water line. “You think your old man can’t get a girlfriend? ‘Cause guess what, buddy? Believe it or not, girls all over the world used to have posters of me on their walls.”

“Yeah, when you were in the Backstreet Boys,” he fired back without missing a beat. “But not now.”

I don’t think he really meant to hurt my feelings, but his words hit me harder than I wanted to admit, bringing my own insecurities back to the forefront of my mind. “Maybe not,” I said, shrugging. “But, hey, now that I’m back in the Backstreet Boys, we can make brand new posters for them to put up!”

Mason just raised his eyebrows before returning his attention to his toy boat. His lack of a response frustrated me.

“Would it bother you if I started going out with a girlfriend?” I pressed him gently. When he shrugged, I went on, “You remember when I went to London a few months ago?”

Mason nodded, still not looking at me.

“Well, I met this really nice woman named Natalie on the plane ride there, and… I really like her.” I lowered the washcloth. “I think you’d like her, too. I would love for you to meet her. Would that be all right with you?”

He finally glanced back up at me. “Is she your girlfriend?”

I hesitated, torn between telling him the truth now and waiting until he had gotten to know Natalie to break the news to him. “I would like her to be,” I finally answered. “But I also want you to be okay with it. You’re the most important person in my life, Mason, and nothing will ever change that. Your feelings matter to me.”

He just stared at me without answering, his face emotionless. Worried some of what I’d said may have gone over his head, I decided to try a different tactic.

“What if I invited Natalie to go to Dinosaur World with us next week for your birthday?” I asked him. “That way, you could hang out with her, too, and we could all do something fun together. What do you say? Would that be okay?”

Mason didn’t seem entirely thrilled with my idea, but he nodded. It wasn’t quite the enthusiastic response I had hoped for, but I supposed I was expecting a lot out of a five-year-old in wanting him to welcome a woman he’d never met into his life. I didn’t say any more about it as we wrapped up bathtime and read a book before bed.

But later that evening, after I’d tucked Mason in and told him goodnight, I FaceTimed Natalie to invite her up for his birthday the following week.

“I would love to meet Mason and be a part of his birthday celebration!” she replied, her face beaming on my phone screen. “But are you sure he’s okay with me coming?”

“He’ll be fine,” I assured her, setting the phone in my lap as I rolled across my bedroom floor. “Sorry for the bad angle. But, yeah, I figure going somewhere fun will help the two of you bond better than if I just had you over to the house. You can still sleep here if you want to, of course.” After her last visit, I’d made an appointment with my urologist, who had offered me a couple of options I was eager to try out in the bedroom.

“Sure, sounds good!”

“If it works with your schedule, I was thinking you could stay through the fourth and meet the rest of my family,” I went on as I wheeled past each window, pulling the room-darkening curtains closed. “Then we could fly to Atlanta together a day or two before I leave for London on the seventh. That would give me a chance to see where you’re from.”

“Yeah, that works for me,” she said. “I’d love to show you around Atlanta. You’ll probably have to get a hotel room, though. My apartment’s pretty small – and not the most accessible.”

“Oh, that’s fine; Dawn and Keith will fly down with us, so I was already planning to book us hotel rooms. I’ll figure all that out in the morning.” I looked into my walk-in closet, where one of my large suitcases lay open on the storage ottoman, and made a mental note to call Delta to change my flight reservation.

“It’s already morning here,” she said. “I just woke up half an hour ago.”

“How do you look so damn good first thing in the morning?” I asked, glancing down at my phone as I backed my chair up next to my bed. Even without makeup, she was beautiful, her tousled brown hair falling over her shoulders in loose waves. I longed to run my fingers through it, to brush it back out of the way so I could kiss the bare skin along her neck and collarbones.

Natalie laughed. “Are you kidding? Do you not see these dark circles under my eyes?” she replied, pointing to her face.

“Nah… didn’t even notice ‘em.” I tilted back onto my anti-tip bars and propped my push handles against the side of my bed so I could recline in my chair. “I like the natural look,” I added, picking my phone up from my lap. If I held it right in front of my face, I could almost pretend she was in the room with me.

“You’re sweet,” she said, smiling into the camera.

“So, how was your first night in Seoul?” Thanks to the wonders of technology, I had almost forgotten she was on the opposite side of the world. The feed was so clear, she could have been talking to me from across town instead of South Korea.

“Not bad. It was pretty lowkey; I just went out to dinner with my crew and then came back to the hotel to crash,” she replied. “But, oh my goodness, we had the best bulgogi!”

“That’s my favorite Korean food,” I said, grinning back at her. “I love the kimchi they serve with it, too.”

“Yes! So good!” She changed positions, flopping back onto a pile of pillows propped against the headboard of her hotel bed. “So, how’s your night been?”

“Pretty good. I watched a movie with Mason earlier… The Land Before Time?”

“Oh, I love that movie!” she said, her whole face lighting up. “It was one of my favorites when I was a kid.”

“Really? What year did it come out?”

“I’m pretty sure my parents took me to see it in the theater for my seventh birthday, so… 1988?”

“No wonder I never saw it,” I said, chuckling. “I was a senior in high school that year.” It suddenly occurred to me that Natalie was closer in age to Dawn’s son than she was to Dawn and me, which made me feel even older.

“This was your first time watching it?” Natalie gasped. Then she grinned. “Did you cry?”

“Oh my god, yes.” I groaned. “Who ever thought a kids’ movie about cartoon dinosaurs could make a grown man cry like a little girl? But, damn… it wrecked me!”

She giggled. “It’s definitely a tearjerker. How did Mason do?” she asked, her smile fading as her expression turned serious.

“Fine,” I said, shrugging. “Much better than me. But he’d seen it before; he watched it with my mom last week. I think he was more interested in all the different dinosaurs than the actual story.”

“Well, I can’t wait to go see some dinosaurs with him,” she said brightly. “That sounds like a lot of fun!”

“Yeah,” I agreed, already counting down the days until I could be with her in person again. “I can’t wait.”

***