impress me? I loved the idea that I had a positive influence on them.
“We didn’t know about it,” Jen told me. “It was you. You educated us, you told us we should watch it.”
At those words my pride swelled. I felt like their big sister. Like part of a real family hanging out together.
Another evening we played Novelist. It was Dan’s idea. It turned out he loved reading.
“So,” he said. He had gathered up some pencils and pens from drawers and tabletops and was now ripping a sheet of writing paper into quarters. “We take it in turns to be the moderator. Let’s say Jen’s the moderator. She finds a book, from the library here, or going on Amazon and searching in the ‘Look Inside This Book’ feature. She just needs the first sentence. She can even give us the title of the book, or at least the genre. She writes that sentence down. Then we all write a fake but real-sounding sentence in the style of the genre, on our separate bits of paper. She mixes them up in a hat, reads them out, and we have to guess which one is the real one and which are the phony ones. It’s a lot of fun.”
I bit my lip. “I hope you don’t pick sci-fi.”
“I’ll suck at romance,” Dan said.
An Italian cookbook came next. I won the round and fooled them all with my first sentence. “The onion is at the center and heart of every Italian meal.”
Dan won another round with, “She’d been dying slowly for ten hours.” (Crime fiction.)
Jen’s was: “The women filed past in a single line, steam rising from their bare, wretched backs.” (A dystopian novel.)
Kate’s: “Blackie sniffed the air.” (A children’s dog book.)
A few days later, a Monday, when everyone had a day off work (Kate worked as a hiking guide and Jen was a receptionist at one of the chic hotels nearby), the triplets suggested lunch. Then, on Wednesday it became lunch, a long walk on the beach, and a movie afterwards. I didn’t need to graze around the kitchen or dig through the freezer for ready-made meals anymore. The three of them insisted on cooking (I paid for all the groceries), and with all the delicious leftovers, I enjoyed hearty meals for the week. They were so generous with me. Always bringing little gifts, or posies of wild flowers they’d picked themselves. These kids behaved like self-sufficient grown-ups, despite their circumstance. Unusual for young people these days, considering so many still live with their parents. Kate took to calling me twice a day. Telling me her troubles, which strangely never included her mother. Having the triplets around distracted me from my grief. And, more importantly, it made me feel needed, and being needed felt so good. I could give something of myself. It brought out the best in me.
As well as their wonderful company and the great rapport we were establishing, they proved themselves to be invaluable in practical ways. Dan was true to his word; he was a wiz with the tool kit and electrical stuff. He fixed the gate (connected it back to the alarm system), the broken part of the fence, adjusted the TV satellite, practically risked his life cleaning all the windows (suspended like Spider-Man on a harness) until they gleamed, and he even unclogged a bathroom drain. Kate, also, was fantastically helpful. Very strong and physically fit from her hiking, she thought nothing of lifting heavy objects—the weighty boxes of law books I still hadn’t unpacked, for instance. She became invaluable to me, acting as my chauffeur (my ankle was still sore), and all sorts of other favors. With Kate—and Jen coming along for the ride—grocery shopping was no longer a lonely chore. I offered to pay the triplets for their time, but they refused. Their kindness touched my heart. Juan was gone, but this lot had become my sort of surrogate family. My life felt purposeful for the first time since his death. I was no longer agonizing about not having kids or beating myself up about my lack of courage to adopt a child as a single mother. I wasn’t ready for such a huge step. The triplets were the perfect antidote: independent young adults, yet attached to me. They were like a gift.
Before I knew it, this lively trio was part and parcel of the house, and I was falling in love with each one of them. They had the entry code for the