Above the din of conversation, Evelyn could not make out what Justin was saying. He was looking her way, though, so she knew he was speaking to her. She leaned in to the circle in her living room that was responsible for the noise level that ratcheted up with every round of beer, wine and eggnog her guests fetched from her kitchen.

Evelyn’s daughter Laura had again invited Justin to the Parker’s Christmas Eve party, following her invitation for him to join them for the previous Thanksgiving dinner.

“With grad school closed, he’s got no place to go for the holidays, Mom,” she’d explained.

Evelyn leaned in farther, winking her eyes and putting her hand to her ear, to signal Justin she could not hear what he was trying to say to her. It was more than mildly annoying that Evelyn couldn’t hear him; of all Laura’s male friends who seemed to hit on Evelyn the moment they’d met her, Justin had impressed her for two reasons. First, he hadn’t tried to hit on her, and second, she’d found herself, on that Thanksgiving night after Justin had left, sort of wishing he had.

“I can’t help it if my friends think you’re hot, mom,” Laura had explained, a wry smile on her face. “Maybe if you’d come down from your ivory tower and get a boyfriend your own age, my friends would be more inclined to leave you alone. They see you as single, available, and maybe a little desperate. Plus you don’t look anywhere near your age.”

It was Evelyn’s best friend Anne who’d explained the concept and the term. “They’re MILF Hunters,” Anne said over lunch one day.

“MILF Hunters?”

“Yes. Mothers I’d Like to—you know.”

“It has a name?” Evelyn had never heard the term, but she was not the fan of internet porn her best friend was.

“Not just a name, but a whole category all to itself. Just type MILF in any search engine, and you’ll find everything you want.”

“Well, I don’t want anything of the kind, thank you very much,” Evelyn had replied.

Evelyn remembered Anne’s look, a mixture of doubt and scorn.

“So you’re going to sit there and tell me you’ve never surfed for porn, not even on a Friday or Saturday night after watching an Antonio Banderas movie, and you’re alone in that empty house of yours? Maybe just a little more visual stimulation to help the vibrator along?”

Evelyn felt her face redden. Indeed she had once or twice used the internet, looking to enhance her vibrator’s effects, more frequently in recent months, during which the sadness and ache of losing the love of her life to cancer five years earlier had finally begun to recede. Yes, her sexual urges had returned, guiltily at first, then embarrassingly, followed by a sense of resignation and then, almost wryly, with a grudging spark of relief that those urges had returned, with all the passion and heat Robert had once managed to draw from her.

Those urges returned in a strange way, though. Evelyn’s internet searches were directed to lesbian sites. She could not explain why at first. Even when she could say with certainty that was not a direction she was heading in, she’d noticed there was something about the lesbian lovers that did ring true for her. There’s a feeling for each other that’s different from what I know.

She believed she’d accidentally stumbled upon a new insight, one that left her hopeful, but not one she understood sufficiently to talk about it. Especially to Anne.

“That’s on a need-to-know basis, Miss Nosy, and you don’t need to know,” she’d responded that day to Anne’s internet insinuation.

“I’ll take that as a yes, then,” Anne had responded with arched brows.

“Take it any way you wish.”

After five years, Evelyn did feel a growing desire for companionship that no longer made her angry at herself for betraying the memory of her beloved Robert. She certainly, however, entertained no interest in any of her daughter’s friends. At fifty-one, she knew she could no longer claim the label of cougar, even if she’d wanted to, despite what Anne had told her.

“With a little more makeup, a new ‘do and some appropriate come hither clothing, you could get away with late thirties, no problem,” Anne had assured her. “I know more about police work, firefighting, plumbing and swimming pool maintenance than I ever thought I would,” Anne had confided with a most lascivious wink.

Evelyn had no intention of cruising the pickup bars Anne continued to frequent, in spite of how amazing as Evelyn had to admit Anne could make herself look. In spite of Anne’s breathless recitations of some of the gorgeous hunks she’d hooked up with, Evelyn had no intention of turning her life into the blue movie Anne had made of her own.

Still...

Justin Bowman was different than all the other young men Laura had brought to the house, courtesy of Laura’s own engaging personality, plus the magnetic charms of her boyfriend cum fiancé, Derrick.

Where most of the young men on the prowl for someone like Evelyn emerged from Derrick’s side of the ledger, Justin was Evelyn’s friend from her grad school European History study group.

“He knows all there is to know about Europe in the twentieth century,” Laura explained, when she’d told her mother she’d invited him for Thanksgiving.

Evelyn saw immediately that Laura had not overstated Justin’s almost encyclopedic knowledge, especially of the Cold War and Berlin in the mid to late sixties, the very time that Evelyn, as a six-month old baby, had been smuggled out of East Berlin in dramatic fashion to relatives awaiting her in the West.