I was employed in a roadhouse, many years ago, and had just returned to work. I’d suffered quite a bad injury which had affected my left arm and hand, and I was learning/teaching myself how to get some strength back into it. Some things had to be done slightly differently.

We had a new staff member, an older lady who hadn’t worked for quite some time, and when we were busy I’d kinda take over for a while because I knew how to do things quicker, despite my injury. What I didn’t know, though, was that she had a son.

The first time I spotted him, he was crouched down and peering around the corner of the counter. As I found out later, he was pretending to hide from his mother, thinking she was the one sitting on a stool having a short break. Unfortunately for him, it wasn’t his mother, it was me. I raised an eyebrow at him and he stood up, his face quite red, and went and sat down, or moved away or something. I can’t quite remember. Perhaps he even left the building for a short while before re-entering with some other blokes. I am not really sure. It was a long time ago.

Anyway, I went back into the kitchen and said to the woman I was working with, ‘I think there might be some people here for you,’ as I’d figured out rather quickly from his body language it wasn’t me he was trying to surprise.

We both went out to the counter, where three of them now stood. A little bloke, another bloke, and the one who had been trying, not very well, to surprise his mother. Of course, I didn’t know it was his mother. No one had thought to tell me that.

So, when they left and we went back into the kitchen, I said to my fellow staff member, ‘Who’s the one with the nice arse?’

She thought I was talking about the other bloke, the one not her husband, and the one not her son, so she said another name to me, with a questioning tone behind it. We discussed what he looked like and I said…

‘Nah, not him, the younger one. The one wearing the footy shorts.’

‘Oh.’ She sounded quite surprised. ‘That’s my son.’ And, you know what, there might have been an exclamation mark in that sentence.

‘Oh is it?’ I said. ‘Well, he’s got a nice arse.’

After some thought on my behalf, and not in the least bit sorry about telling the woman her son had a delectable backside, I asked for a little bit more information.

‘Oh he’s very shy,’ she said. ‘He had a bad accident himself, and when he’s at home he doesn’t really go out much.’

‘He’s shy?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh well, we can fix that,’ I said, and I wrote something on a piece of paper and gave it to his mother, before adding, ‘How old is he?’

He was around four years younger than me. Me, being the practical type, thought well, blokes are meant to die (not always) slightly earlier than their feminine counterparts, so if we got married (yes, I’m laughing) if we were lucky, we’d die around the same time. Now, you must remember this little piece here is a joke, and I do have quite a dark sense of humour, so please do not take that the wrong way.

On the piece of paper I had written my name and phone number, as ya do, but I had also written a short instruction of how he was going to pick me up on a certain day and take me to the movies.

‘I don’t think he’ll take you up on that,’ my fellow employee said, looking at the piece of paper. ‘He really is quite shy.’

‘Okay,’ I said, and added three more words.

‘Do you think that will work?’ she asked.

‘Of course it will,’ I said. ‘No one wants to be beaten by a girl.’

I was right. No bloke in his right mind would back out on a dare. Not one like that, anyway. His mother took the note home, handed it to him, he started laughing and not too much later he picked up the phone and gave me a call.

The rest is history. We were engaged eight months later. There is, of course, a lot more to this story but some things, I think, are nobody else’s business.