back at the lawyer Cecilia had brought to her attention. Her smile was wide and infinitely hopeful. “If you ask me, this seems like a match made in heaven. She’s a toymaker who loves children and he’s a widower with a child who by definition loves toys. It doesn’t get any better than this.”
Neither of her friends disagreed. “But how do you suggest we go about bringing these two made-for-each-other people together without them knowing it was a setup?” Theresa, ever practical, asked.
Maizie chewed on her lower lip for a moment as she gave that little problem her undivided attention. “The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer,” she said, reciting an old mantra.
“That’s Maizie-speak for nobody goes home until we come up with a plan for them to meet,” Theresa said with a sigh, bracing herself for a long night.
Maizie patted her friend’s hand as she rose to her feet. “You know me so well. I’ll put up a pot of coffee,” she told her friends before crossing to the kitchen.
* * *
Erin O’Brien hung up her phone, still a little bewildered at exactly how Felicity Robinson had gotten her name, much less her phone number. But then, she supposed in this day and age of rampant nonprivacy, anything was possible for someone with a reasonable amount of tech savvy if they were determined enough. And if there was one thing she had come away with from this conversation, it was that the assistant principal of James Bedford Elementary School certainly sounded extremely determined.
“Guess what,” Erin said to the friendly-looking stuffed T. rex on her desk, one of several that she owned. The T. rex had been the first toy she’d ever made, and the original, now rather shabby for wear, was locked away in a safe. “We’re going back to school. Seems that somebody wants me to talk to a roomful of seven-year-olds about how I got started making toys.”
She cocked her head, giving the T. rex a voice in her head and having him make up excuses for why they couldn’t go. The T. rex embodied her insecurities. He always had. It had been her way of dealing with them as a child.
“Oh, don’t give me that snooty face,” she said, addressing the dinosaur. “You’re a ham and you know it. This’ll be fun, you’ll see,” she promised, using almost the same words that the assistant principal had when she’d called her.
“Yeah, for you,” the high-pitched voice whined. “Because you’ll say anything you want through me.”
Erin leaned over her desk and pulled the stuffed animal to her. Affectionately dubbed Tex the T. rex, the stuffed dinosaur had been her start, her very first venture into the toy world. Imagination—a positive imagination—had been her crutch, her way of dealing with all the things that had been going on in her young world when life had consisted of machines that whirled and made constant noise at different frequencies while they measured every kind of vital sign they possibly could via the countless tubes that seemed to be tied or attached to her little, sick, failing body.
Even back then, though shy, she’d possessed an inner feistiness. She’d done her best to be brave so that her mother wouldn’t cry, but even so, Erin was firmly convinced that if she hadn’t invented Tex—her alter ego as well as her champion—when she had, she would have broken down rather than triumphed over the disease that had threatened to end her life more than once all those years ago.
Tex had started out as a drawing and was, for the most part, a figment of her imagination until she had given him life by utilizing an old green sock her mother had brought her.
Somehow he managed to stay with her—in spirit and in drawings—all the way through school. A while later, she decided to give Tex a better form. Her mother went to a craft store and bought green felt, and Erin had had stuffing. Armed with a needle and thread as well as a black Magic Marker, she brought the dinosaur to “life” one fall afternoon.
From that day forward, in one form or another, Tex had remained with her.
A chance comment from a child in an on-campus day-care center was ultimately responsible for her creating a friend for Tex—Anita. Anita was equally nonmechanical. Equally gifted with a soul via Erin’s imagination.
And suddenly, Imagine That was born.
“And now we get to tell a cluster of second graders all about you,” Erin told her stuffed animal with pride.
“Don’t forget the part where you would be nowhere without me,” “Tex” reminded her in that same high-pitched version of her voice.
“I won’t forget,” she promised, saying the words as if she were actually carrying on a conversation with another human being.
She indulged in the little charade mainly when none of her staff was around, so that they wouldn’t think she was losing her mind if they happened to overhear her in effect talking to herself. It helped her knock off steam when things got tense, but she could see how it might unnerve someone witnessing her exchanges with herself.
“We made it, Tex. We made it to the big time—or to the little time, if you will,” she augmented with a grin.
For once Tex said nothing.
But she knew what he was “thinking.” The very same thing she was. That they had truly “made it” in more ways than one.
Steve hung up the landline phone in the kitchen and looked over at his son. Jason, as usual, was in the family room, his attention glued to the action on the TV screen.
“Did you have anything to do with this, Jason?” he asked.
“To do with what, Dad?” his son responded after he repeated the question a total of three times. As had become his habit, Jason was only half paying attention to anything going on outside of the video game he was playing. The game had become an all-important obsession for him, something he did with most of his waking hours unless his father made him do mundane things like eat and sleep and go to school. Aside from that, he could be found before the TV in the family room, defeating aliens and making the universe safe for another day.
He was not about to relax his vigilance, convinced that slacking off for even a second would bring about dire consequences. It could bring about the end of life as he knew it, as everyone in his world knew it. He couldn’t allow that to happen. Not on his watch. He’d already lost his mother; he couldn’t afford to lose his father or his grandmother, as well.
“I was just on the phone with your assistant principal,” Steve said, nodding toward the receiver he’d just hung up. “She asked if I’d speak to your class on Career Day.”
He sank down on the sofa. Jason’s thumbs were going a mile a minute on the controller. The TV monitor was filled with dying aliens that disintegrated into tiny purple clouds before vanishing altogether.
Steve couldn’t help wondering if his son had even heard him. “I didn’t know you had a Career Day.”
Jason shrugged, his small shoulders rising and falling in an exaggerated motion since he was lying on his stomach. “I guess so,” he mumbled.
Without Julia, his late wife, as a buffer, Steve had found himself groping around, trying to find his way in his son’s world. Every time he thought he was making just a tiny bit
