Category: My perfect dad (Page 1 of 5)

DadNet charged a lot of money and made grand promises without much to back them up. But I didn’t care. I was desperate. For the last three years, I had secretly lusted after my next-door neighbor Keith. I watched the 40-something divorced computer programmer wash his car in the driveway, mow his lawn in the summertime, and shovel the pavement in the wintertime. I had built up an entire relationship in my head and played it out in a thousand different ways. In some scenarios, we were married. In others, we were just fuck buddies. Keith wasn’t a supermodel or anything. There was nothing about him that I found particularly intimidating, and there was no real reason why I couldn’t just approach him and ask him out. I was just too scared of rejection. 
 
And then, one day, I saw the “for sale” sign staked into his front yard. After all this time secretly lusting after Keith, now he was moving, and I would never get my chance at him. I kicked myself for an entire weekend, already resigned to the fact that Keith was destined to be the one that got away. 

Neil balanced his laptop on the arm of the sofa and stretched, his foot knocking a half-empty bag of potato chips onto the floor in the process. It was the middle of the afternoon, but he still wore the ratty gym shorts and faded concert T-shirt he’d slept in the night before. The TV blared. Some trashy daytime talk show host was reading out the results of a paternity test amidst raucous jeers from the studio audience. A pyramid of soda cans balanced precariously on the windowsill, and a trio of empty takeout containers sat on the coffee table. 

One of the dozen browser tabs Neil had open chirped with a notification. He turned the TV down and sidled back to his laptop, quickly clicking through his social media profiles.