She'd looked uncomfortable with his hand, as if it were a bad fit. Finally, on the pretext of getting something in the kitchen she rose and when she returned sat on a chair across the room from the man. Sid stayed up long past his bed time that night to protect her from the reappearance of that hand, which had been so still on her knee, yet so inexplicably threatening. When Sid was a grown man, just beginning a relationship with his future wife Rose, Dorothy had admitted to him that she'd missed having a man for most of her life. It's like a piece of the puzzle I lost forever when I lost Roger.
Bad luck is all.
There are a lot of good men. I just had bad luck. Sid, now 40, found it impossible to leave a restaurant without taking souvenirs. He told his children that restaurants expected their patrons to take a few extra packets of sugar or to stuff their pockets with toothpicks for the road or to wrap up the leftover bread sticks. Rose objected to what she called his pilfering and they argued about it.