He’d climb out of the back seat, walk around the front of the car, pull my door open with both hands, and stand there next to it like a very small valet until I’d gotten out and gotten my purse.
“That’s my gentleman,” I’d tell him.
And he’d grin so wide you could see where his front tooth used to be.
What Ryan Thought of All This
My husband usually watched this whole production from behind the steering wheel with his fingers drumming on it.
“You know the doors open from the inside too, right? They thought of everything. It’s called engineering.”
Mason would giggle. But he still waited until I was fully settled before he closed my door, carefully, both hands again.
I wanted those gestures to become automatic. Not a performance. The kind of thing a person does without thinking about it, like my father did, for fifty years.
