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ever remember their first kiss of the night taking that long. He usually kissed her before he even said a word. Of course, he hadn’t actually said a word yet tonight, either.
    â€œYou seem a little . . . scary,” Antoinette said tentatively. “What’s wrong?”
    Don let some of the tension go out of his body
and put his hand in hers. His eyes softened, too; he no longer looked like he was on a hunt.
    â€œI’m sorry, Hannah. I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m a little tense, that’s all.”
    â€œCan I help you with anything?”
    â€œNot unless you have a spare father lying around.” Don’s lips pulled together and his color deepened. “I had dinner with him tonight. He said he wanted to have a ‘man-to-man’ with me. What he really wanted to do was have a ‘man-to-useless-waste-of-a-person’ with me. He spent the entire time telling me how much of a disappointment I was to him.”
    Antoinette squeezed Don’s hand. “He said that to you?”
    â€œNot in those words, exactly. Actually, what he said was worse. He told me that he thought I’d been making terrible decisions since I was a teenager. He said I was throwing away my time on unrealistic expectations for my career, and that if I didn’t learn a trade soon, I’d wind up a beggar on the street.”
    â€œHe didn’t actually say that , did he?”
    â€œYou’re right; he didn’t say, ‘beggar.’ I think the word he used was ‘bum.’ Yes, ‘bum,’ that was definitely it.”
    â€œOh, Don.”
    Don had barely spoken about his father in the half year Antoinette had been with him. She had met his parents on a few occasions, but she and Don never spent time there. Antoinette had always assumed that they visited at her house because her mother was always baking for him and fawning over him – she could smell brownies in the oven right now,
as a matter of fact. From what Don was telling her as they were sitting here, though, that wasn’t the reason at all.
    â€œHe thinks I don’t have the talent to be an executive, in spite of how well things are going for me at the company. He thinks they’re going to find out soon enough that I’m just a dope and then they’ll kick me out the door.”
    â€œYour boss told you just the other day that you’re one of the sharpest trainees they’ve ever had. They’ve been complimenting you left and right. Did you tell your father that?”
    Don stood anxiously. She’d never seen him struggle like this to contain himself. He’d always been so cool.
    â€œHe even managed to turn that against me. He told me that corporations use those techniques to squeeze everything they can out of trainees before they toss them aside. How would he even know that? He’s a pipe fitter!”
    Antoinette reached a hand for Don to try to bring him back to her. She’d never seen him in so much pain and she wanted to hold him and let him know that she believed in him. She supposed it was possible that Don’s father knew something about how corporations worked, but that didn’t mean he was right about Don. Any corporation would know how lucky they were to have him and they would do everything they could to keep him.
    Just then, her mother came into the living room with the brownies on a tray with two glasses of milk. Antoinette was afraid that Don might say something
sharp because he was so tense, but he greeted Mother warmly, even complimenting her housedress, which always set Mother fluttering. Antoinette signaled with her eyebrows that her mother should leave them alone, and fortunately she did so. Mother probably thought they wanted to snuggle. Little did she know that Antoinette was having trouble getting Don to even stop pacing around the room.
    When she was gone, Don returned to the couch and Antoinette circled him with her arms, feeling him ever so