Once upon a time way before the husband came along, a woman was dating younger men. Not even remotely on purpose. There were just more of them who seemed to be available. It was fine. She could only go so much younger at this point, because she herself was young. Let’s say it started when she was about twenty-seven or twenty-eight. There might still have been a scrunchie in her hair. She might still have been listening to Terence Trent D’Arby on her Walkman. And let’s be clear: it was never inappropriate. In the early days of dating younger, it was never more than a few years. And one more thing: her fictional dream man has always been her exact same age, has her exact same pop culture references, like James at 15, or England Dan and John Ford Coley. There was one guy, when she was around thirty, who was way older, which was not an improvement, was a massive overcorrection age-wise, but this guy was wrong for her in ways that had little to do with how old he was. Then more younger guys after that, but again, only by a few years, that kind of age difference where twenty years later you realize you were always the same age. Sadly, as time went on, most of the men she met were somehow not getting older, they seemed to be getting five to ten years younger, and she did not see this as a plus; they were cute and interesting but generally had roommates and ate a lot of ramen (before the upscale ramen restaurant thing happened, just straight four-for-a-dollar ramen), and thought a great date was a Blockbuster video and ramen for two, with maybe some hot sauce added in to doctor it up, but she never liked spicy food, so only the guy’s ramen was doctored up, hers was plain old undisguised ramen, twelve and a half cents’ worth of ramen, served in mismatched cereal bowls, and this kind of dating went on for a couple years, nothing too serious, obviously, if the word obviously even needs to be added, and then in a more unfortunate turn, before this period of her life had passed, the term cougar came into popularity. And right about there she met the man who would become her husband, and she was forty-one and he was twenty-eight and the age difference was neither unnoticed nor unconsidered, but was ultimately put aside in favor of taking it one day at a time. Between them, at that time, they had one living parent. They knew loss. And they knew that they didn’t know what was ahead in terms of who’d go first, because nobody gets to know that, and they were in love. They got along. It was easy. They got married. That was easy too. It was all easy, always.