should never allow business to intrude."
"I didn't say that," Cynthia answered though he'd addressed the question to Kathryn. "I just don't want to feel I'm in the way."
"I refuse to go out with a man unless he leaves his cell phone or pager at home," Kathryn said. "If he doesn't have the time to concentrate on me, then I don't have the time to concentrate on him."
"What if there's an emergency?" Ron asked. "Something could happen at the shelter."
"I always tell Ruby where I'm going."
"There are still times when you couldn't be reached. Having a phone just in case an emergency comes up would remove all worry."
"No Palm Pilots, either," Kathryn said. "One date tried to outline a presentation he was giving the next day."
"I don't care about any of that stuff," Cynthia said, beginning to sound impatient. "I just want to feel even if you have to talk on the phone you'd rather be talking to me."
"Did you tell me I was paying too much attention to work and not enough to you?"
"Lots of times. You'd stop for a little while, but soon you'd be doing it all over again. After a while I gave up."
For Ron, there never seemed to be any time constraints on doing things with his family. If he didn't do it today, he could do it tomorrow. Or the day after that. That wasn't true in business. Things had to be taken care of the moment they came up - opportunities had to be grasped, or they would disappear. Erin had understood that and encouraged him to pursue every opportunity that presented itself.
After she died, he'd doubled his efforts because of the promises he'd made to her. Cynthia had been too small to tell him she didn't feel the same way her mother had. And if he was honest with himself, he'd have said she was too small for him to think she had an opinion he ought to consider. It would never have occurred to him that she could really want him. He thought girls wanted their mothers. They only wanted their fathers when it was time to go to the debutante ball or host the big summer party at the beach. It was only boys who wanted their fathers to do things with, to ask questions, to talk with about making plans for the future, what they wanted out of life.
Maybe he'd been wrong. Maybe some girls wanted that same kind of relationship with their fathers.
The idea pleased him. He'd always felt like an adjunct to Cynthia's life. From the moment she was born, he'd loved her dearly, but Erin had said children were a woman's job. Nothing had come along to change that picture. Or if it had, he hadn't paid attention to it. He'd always thought of himself as the provider, the parent who made Cynthia's life possible, not a participant in it. For the first time he realized how much he had missed out on. Cynthia's problem was his problem, too.
"If I could do it all over again, what would you want me to do?" he asked Cynthia.
"Think of me first."
That sounded so simple, but Ron wondered if he'd ever thought of anybody before his career, including himself. Since he was ten, he'd thought of nothing but the kind of life he wanted and what he had to do to get it. Thinking back, he couldn't remember what he was like back then, what he wanted out of life before that fateful day when he realized not all children were like him. Had he been happy? Had he been content with his toys, the clothes he wore, his parents, his trailer? Did he have friends he enjoyed playing with? What had happened to that little boy? Was there anything of him left?
Erin never talked about the years before they met. Maybe there was a little girl she had forgotten, a little girl who wasn't driven by dreams of a life different from the one she had, a little girl who wanted more from people and less from things.
Maybe that's where both he and Erin had changed. Their parents failed to give them that sense of security, of safety, of being loved and valued that all children wanted and needed. In its place, they'd reached for something else. But Cynthia had never felt insecure, unsafe, or ignored the way they had. She couldn't understand their needs because she'd never experienced them. He and Erin had been successful in giving their