"I am not going to apologize." He was adamant. He refused to apologize. She was not going to convince him that he owed Patsy an apology, neither was he was going to tell her what really happened. She might explode.
"Dad, just call her, alright? She wants you to call. You do not need to use the word, "apology," but you do need to call her. She said you left, just walked out."
"Oh, alright, Mary Ann, I'll talk to her later, but I'm busy right now." He thought if he offered a good enough excuse to his daughter, she would hang up and leave him alone.
Mary Ann wasn't about to let him off the hook that easily. "Do it now," she said persistently. The exasperation in her voice was over and above the command she was issuing. "It will only take one minute, maybe two, and then you can go back to your whatever."
"Yes, yes, Mary Ann, I will talk to her in a little while. I promise. Is that enough? Can I go back to what I was doing?"
"Yes, Dad," Mary Ann said, finally calming down. "I'm sorry. Thank you. I should have already said that. I'll talk to you later."
Woodson Crossman, or Woody, as most of his friends called him, was busy. He was always busy, or at least he tried to stay that way. When his daughter called, he was trying to finish some research online so he could complete a letter to the editor of the local newspaper. The city workers who collect trash continue to leave his trashcan in the street, causing a hindrance to traffic. When he finished the research, he planned to go back to the woodworking project he started earlier that morning. The bottom fell out of one of the drawers in his kitchen and he was rebuilding the drawer. In addition, he still had some vegetables to gather from his small garden and then he would fix his supper. He wanted to finish the letter after he had eaten.
The vegetables caused the problem. His daughter mentioned that her friend, Patsy, would like some fresh tomatoes. She was tired of the flat tasting ones she buys at the grocery store. Instead of leaving the whole bag of vegetables with his daughter, Woody took half of the tomatoes to Patsy.
Woody was retired, but he was not tired. He was not yet fifty years old. He worked for one company for twenty-five years. He started as a high school student, in the warehouse, and ended up as the Warehouse Manager when he retired. When the recently widowed wife of the owner sold Ceramic Tile Sales and Distribution, Woody took his portion of the employee stock plan in money. He paid off his house and invested the rest, which gave him enough income to do what he wanted, though he didn't consider himself wealthy. However, most of what he wanted to do was putter. That is what his late wife called it. She would tell her friends,
"Oh, he's out in his workshop puttering around with something."
Although Woody was still healthy and active, he began to realize something was missing from his life. He knew what it was, but he was not interested in the offers he received from other single people he knew, or met, and he was tired of his friends trying to set him up with another date. Until a little over a year ago, he and his wife had a satisfying life. Their two grown children were leading lives of their own. Woody and Louise had friends, took vacations, shared some household chores, and still enjoyed sex, although not as often as he would have liked to enjoy it.
Louise was beginning to have some problems with menopause. She had recently gained some weight and her sex drive was dwindling.
Rapidly
. To Woody it was frighteningly rapid. He did not realize her depression was so bad. In fact, no one realized it was that bad, not even her doctor. It was apparent that taking a whole bottle of pills and going to sleep was her solution to the depression.
Woody was still a good-looking man. He was not truly handsome and girls never described him as a hunk. Nevertheless, he was always popular with the ladies. He maintained his weight, stood up straight, and still had most of his hair, but it was about half gray. Oh well, his father was white haired by the time he was fifty, so Woody figured he was ahead of the game. That was the problem, as he saw it. He was healthy, active, no longer needed to work full-time, still had his hair, and was handy around the house. Someone was always calling him for help with a handyman chore. Friends told their friends. Many, or most, of them were women, and he went to their houses to assist with whatever project they had that needed his skills. Those friends, or friends of friends, and other women introduced to him, were the women who wanted him. They cooked lunch or supper and took the food by his house, frequently offering to serve the meal to him. They also invited him to intimate dinners and tried to set him up with dates with their friends. In general, they simply would not leave him alone. Despite all of this attention, Woody didn't want to have anything to do with them. Not a single one. He knew what he wanted, but he also knew he couldn't have it.
Good grief, he had known Patsy all of her life. She and his daughter Mary Ann were inseparable from the day they started school. That's like more than fifteen years ago. When she was eight or nine years old, he fixed her bicycle when she had a flat tire. He drove Patsy and Mary Ann to the movies on Saturday afternoons. He took his own ladder to her house to hang a swing from the big tree in the back yard. She may have been twelve or thirteen years old at the time.
Now that her mother had remarried, moved in with her new husband, and given the old house to Patsy, Woody had been back to that house on other occasions. One day he replaced the doorknob on her bathroom door. He is no longer Mister Crossman, or Uncle Woody, as her mother instructed her to call him when she was a very small child. He is not her uncle. They aren't even related. She is the daughter of his sister-in-law's brother. To Patsy, he has been Woody ever since he helped her build some shelves in the second bedroom, the room she now uses as her office. That was when he explained the reason he was frequently called Uncle Woody. Since then, she has not used the word uncle a single time. However, she is not a little girl any more. She is a woman.
Considering the way she looks now, he definitely could not help notice the transformation from a child into a woman. Patsy is pretty, well somewhat pretty anyway. She has brown eyes, along with short brown hair, which mostly curls, and the most luscious lips he has ever seen. Her bust is a nice size, at least larger than a double handful. Woody found this out when she sort of mashed herself against him while she was holding one of the shelves in place so he could mark where she wanted it. Although she is not particularly tall, she has the longest legs and she wears the shortest shorts that look like she her body was liquid and poured into them.
