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Gotta Take Her By Surprise!!!

Published
December 21, 2025
5:48 PM PST

A couple of years ago, after his mom died, Fry Bread author Kevin Maillard found himself wondering, “but where did she go?”

“I was really thinking about this a lot when I was cleaning her house out,” Maillard remembers. “She has all of her objects there and there’s like hair that’s still in the brush or there is an impression of her lipstick on a glass.” It was almost like she was there and gone at the same time.

Maillard found it confusing, so he decided to write about it. His new children’s book is And They Walk On, about a little boy whose grandma has died. “When someone walks on, where do they go?” The little boy wonders. “Did they go to the market to thump green melons and sail shopping carts in the sea of aisles? Perhaps they’re in the garden watering a jungle of herbs or turning saplings into great sequoias.”

Rafael López / Roaring Brook Press

Maillard grew up in Oklahoma. His mother was an enrolled member of the Seminole Nation. He says many people in native communities use the phrase “walked on” when someone dies. It’s a different way of thinking about death. “It’s still sad,” Maillard says, “but then you can also see their continuing influence on everything you do, even when they’re not around.”

Rafael López / Roaring Brook Press

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And They Walk On was illustrated by Mexican artist Rafael López, who connected to the story on a cultural and personal level. “‘Walking on’ reminds me so much of the Day of the Dead,” says López, who lost his dad 35 years ago. “My mom continues to celebrate my dad. We talk about something funny that he said. We play his favorite music. So he walks with us every day, wherever we go.”

It was López who decided that the story would be about a little boy: a young Kevin Maillard. “I thought, we need to have Kevin because, you know, he’s pretty darn cute,” he explains. López began the illustrations with pencil sketches and worked digitally, but he created all of the textures by hand. “I use acrylics and I use watercolors and I use ink. And then I distressed the textures with rags and rollers and, you know, dried out brushes,” he says. “I look for the harshest brush that I neglected to clean, and I decide this is going to be the perfect tool to create this rock.”

The illustrations at the beginning of the story are very muted, with neutral colors. Then, as the little boy starts to remember his grandmother, the colors become brighter and more vivid, with lots of purples and lavender. “In Mexico we celebrate things very much with color,” López explains, “whether you’re eating very colorful food or you’re buying a very colorful dress or you go to the market, the color explodes in your face. So I think we use color a lot to express our emotions.”

Rafael López / Roaring Brook Press

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On one page, the little boy and his parents are packing up the grandmother’s house. The scene is very earthy and green-toned except for grandma’s brightly-colored apron, hanging on a hook in the kitchen. “I want people to start noticing those things,” says López, “to really think about what color means and where he is finding this connection with grandma.”

Kevin Maillard says when he first got the book in the mail, he couldn’t open it for two months. “I couldn’t look at it,” he says, voice breaking. What surprised him, he said, was how much warmth Raphael López’s illustrations brought to the subject of death. “He’s very magical realist in his illustrations,” explains Maillard. And the illustrations, if not exactly joyful, are fanciful and almost playful. And they offer hope. “There’s this promise that these people, they don’t go away,” says Maillard. “They’re still with us… and we can see that their lives had meaning because they touched another person.”

Rafael López / Roaring Brook Press

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Freezing your eggs isn’t sexy. Neither the existential questions it forces nor the toll it takes on your body are conducive to dating.

Yet when I matched with Graham on an app last February, the transparency was refreshing. He explained he was newly divorced and co-parenting his two children back home in London. He would be in Los Angeles for a few intervals throughout the year, working as an orchestrator on a blockbuster franchise film.

I was equally forthright about starting my first egg-freezing cycle, unsure how I’d respond to all the hormones I was set to inject. He was very considerate and curious; the conversation flowed. I wanted to grab drinks with him before he left town until summer, even if I could not drink. Bloated and fatigued, I met him on a Saturday at a brewery equidistant from my apartment in Palms and his hotel in Century City.

Although I thought he was a great guy, I was in no emotional state to gauge romantic chemistry. The mandatory celibacy aside, preserving my fertility at 35 and pondering what it meant for perspective partners had clouded my usual fervor. I believe he kissed me after walking me to my car, saying he’d love to see me again when he came back, but most of the date went forgotten in the following months.

He returned and reached out in August, where he again found me in quite a funk. I told him I wasn’t sure where I stood with casual dating, but he still insisted on taking me to dinner, no strings attached. I think I surprised us both by wanting to take our encounter further that night.

When I brought up contraception, he revealed he’d had a vasectomy. I can’t recall if he’d previously mentioned not wanting more kids, but either way, I thought nothing of it where I was concerned. I only found it incredibly presumptuous for him to believe he’d never again change a diaper.

We saw each other once or twice a week for the remainder of the month, mostly grabbing dinner or breakfast at the Westfield mall, where it was cheaper to park than to valet at his hotel around the corner, despite all the time inevitably spent searching for my car.

When he moved to a boutique hotel in Burbank, we ate our way down the row of restaurants on that stretch of Riverside Drive. One night over Japanese barbecue, where he neglected to tell me Brendan Fraser was seated opposite us the entire time, we discussed what we were looking for long-term. I noted our arrangement might be working so well because we knew it was temporary. Since we lived in different cities and were in different chapters of our lives, we could just enjoy the time we were allotted, without reconciling opposing ambitions.

He returned to London for a few weeks but was soon back in Los Angeles for a longer stretch. We celebrated his 40th birthday with his work friends at a bar in Venice. He took me to see Dudamel conduct Mahler’s Second Symphony at Walt Disney Concert Hall. We had tea at the Huntington before wandering through its gardens and buying each other kitschy socks at the gift shop. Although there were still boundaries I maintained given the circumstances, our connection felt unexpectedly effortless.

In October, I spoke with my clinic about doing another round of egg-freezing. I was prescribed birth control pills to delay the start while I traveled for some weddings in my homeland, the East Coast. I was glad a second cycle wouldn’t prohibit me from enjoying my last days with Graham, whom I already missed.

But he was working New Zealand hours now as the crew finalized the film. Finishing its soundtrack simultaneously was far more grueling than he anticipated. Never did I imagine one of the world’s most prolific directors would single-handedly be stopping me from getting laid. I managed to steal Graham away for a few hours of Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios, but that was neither the time nor the place to reflect on our feelings.

He invited me to an industry concert on his last night in town, where I saw him in his element, conducting the score he’d orchestrated, wearing the socks I’d bought him. The woman seated next to me remarked what a great conductor he was and asked his name. I gave it to her and identified him as my friend, despite how amusing I imagined it would be to say I was sleeping with him.

He’d developed a fondness for L.A.’s many doughnut shops, so I brought a box from Sidecar back to his hotel. As he packed, we casually threw out possible avenues for us to reunite. Maybe at an upcoming gig he had in Miami, or meeting halfway the next time I was in New York? Fate simply did not allow us the time or the energy to tie things up neatly. He returned to his home and his children the next day, and I to a new series of hormone injections.

Despite the ocean and continent that now separated us, it seemed I was losing Graham more to bad timing than to time zones. It’s hard to imagine two people farther apart than one who has surgically altered their body to no longer procreate and the other who was medically pushing their body to new limits for the opportunity to do so.

Once I’d healed from my retrieval, I asked Graham for a call to properly process our time together. A month after we said goodbye at his hotel in Burbank, he spoke to me from his hotel in Paris before the film’s European premiere. Although we couldn’t definitively say when our dynamic shifted into something deeper, we agreed it had. We felt better confirming these feelings were mutual, but we remained at the same impasse that had been there from the start.

I let myself be more vulnerable with him than ever before and shared how important having children was to me and what a source of angst it had been that I still hadn’t. Although he loved his children, whose faces and personalities I’d come to know through his many photos and anecdotes, he’d decided long ago he was done.

Still, he reiterated how grateful he was to have met me and how much I’d enriched his time in L.A. beyond his many hours in the studio. He’s almost certain he’ll be back for work at some point, though he doesn’t know when, much less where either of us will be in our dating lives.

But whenever that moment arrives, if neither of us is lucky to have found someone whose goals better align, with whom things feel just as effortless, he is welcome to share his time in Los Angeles with me.

The author is a writer and producer from New York, living in Los Angeles at the intersection of Palms, Culver City and Cheviot Hills. Find her there or at jamiedeline.com and on Instagram @jamiedeline.

L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.