News

One was blond, one brunette and the youngest a shade in between, but the eyes were all the same, gaping with the frozen intensity of wild rabbits having caught a whiff of danger.

They were pretty girls, dressed in jeans with embroidered butterflies and coats from the Gap. The oldest was 10, the others 5 and 7.

Daniel made the introductions and then there was silence — a long pause during which I was certain the portion of my brain responsible for talking had died. I buckled my seatbelt and the truck pulled away from my home.

It was a hearty and reliable truck, much like the man himself. He had an innocent face and a sturdy neckline that didn't have any of those red welts some men get from a razor. His black hair was clean cut around the sides and deliberately messy on top, as though he were trying out a new look.

I spun around to face his girls. "I like your jeans," I said to no one in particular but all three at the same time.

At the grizzled age of 10, Nicole returned my compliment with a purposeful thank you that carried the weighty ambition of showing she was in charge.

The middle girl, a striking child with dark brown bangs that hung in her eyes, smiled at her hands as if someone had whispered a joke only she could hear. The youngest one kept staring at me.

It was too early to imagine being their stepmom, but thoughts like that can never be too far when in my situation.

I don't recall ever being averse to the idea. Not when I agreed to go on a date with their father. Not when I let him stay the night. And not now that I was face to face with his three young girls.

I suppose because I went to journalism school I thought of this as a story waiting to be told. A romance novel. A rewriting of Cinderella. We would get married, my sons, 14 and 18, would get along with his daughters, and we'd be like The Brady Bunch. I suppose this is what I thought, even prayed for, because I was hopelessly, inconveniently, in love.

It's not as though I had never been in love before. There was my children's father, whom I loved for nearly a decade, my ex-boyfriend, who got five good years, and there were others, too. But for all the men I'd ever loved, none had ever given me this kind of feeling. The kind that said the search was over.

"Daddy, your girlfriend is taller than you," Melanie, the five-year-old, said as we got out of the truck at the ice cream parlour. A poster in the window must have caught her attention and she began begging for bubble-gum flavour.

"They probably don't have any," Chantal, the middle child, pointed out. "This isn't the place we usually go."

Nicole kept pace with her dad, wedged between him and me. I slowed my stride and fell behind.

Inside the restaurant we got our ice cream and slid into a red leather booth, me on one side, Daniel on the other, sandwiched between Nicole and Chantal. Melanie tried to fit too, but there was no room.

"Go sit over there," Nicole scolded as she pointed my way.

"No. You go." Melanie gave her sister a shove but got shoved back and her ice cream fell to the floor.

Their dad made one of those false threats kids see right through and then led his crying daughter by the hand to get a new treat, leaving me alone with the other two. They licked at their ice cream while I minced my words.

"I bet you get good grades?" The moment I asked I regretted it. I knew they'd been struggling.

Nicole shrugged. "Guess so."

My relationship with her father had muscled me into so much of her territory that I felt like a trespasser who'd snapped the lock off her diary and now knew things I couldn't let on I knew. Like how she cried after telling her friends they couldn't come over on Saturdays for play dates any more because her parents were divorcing and she was moving away. Or how she assumed the role of the other parent at daddy's home, making sandwiches, sorting laundry and helping with bath time.

Melanie was clutching a new ice cream cone as she and her father walked back to our booth and slid in next to me. She had a pleased look on her face.

Daniel gave my thigh a squeeze that said, "I'm so happy you didn't walk out and never look back."

If statistics had been my guide, I would have. They predicted my relationship stood less than half a chance of making it five years. Instead, I stayed on and in one fell swoop became a wife and a stepmom.

My life today is chaotic and busy and intense. But when I look at my brood of five squished around the kitchen table, and hear the sound of laughter that makes my husband's eyes glow, I know the search really is over, and I am still hopelessly, inconveniently, in love.

Rochelle Squires lives in Winnipeg.