He did so the next day, asking her to dinner.
After a meal where they both expressed distaste at the food, Roger walked Pat to her car.
"He said, 'Can I kiss you goodnight?' And I said, 'Oh, I don't think so.' I don't know where I was."
The next day, Sunday, he came to Pat's house, and the two simply chatted.
After he returned to Washington, the two stayed in touch over the phone. When Roger came back in town a couple weeks later, Pat invited him to her daughter and son-in-law's house warming.
"Really and truly, I totally believe it, I've always told him: he fell in love with my family, and he wanted to be a part of my family."
In 2005, Roger moved to Denver, and the next year they set the wedding date for August 13, the day after Pat's grandson Matt married.
"We really did have a good time," Pat says of their travelling the country and golfing together.
In 2010, the couple were staying a few nights in Estes Park on the way back from Washington. One day while they were there, Roger pointed out a swell on his stomach to Pat.
The two came home, saw a doctor the next morning, and received an MRI immediately.
It was her second time hearing the news of a spouse's cancer diagnosis. This time, it was stage 4 liver and gallbladder cancer.
"It was harder because it was so hard for him," Pat says. "He just cried, and he said, 'I don't want you to have to go through this again.'"
The doctors said he might live six months, but more likely around three weeks.
But just like her first husband, Roger lived the full time, passing away six months later on October 28.
"It's a different experience this time," Pat says.
She told me Roger's story sitting in the living room by the backyard patio. When we had wrapped up our chat, she stood up and indicated a Divine Mercy image hanging above the wall. In front of this image, here in that room, she told me, she had prayed for Roger hours before he died in his hospice bed two rooms over.
Difficult circumstances, unexpected blessings
As a young mother while her first husband was serving overseas, Pat became pregnant after being raped. Her husband managed to secure a re-assignment in the States, and the young family moved to Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.
There, the family met a priest sympathetic to the situation, who found a couple willing to adopt the child. Pat delivered the child, who was then delivered to his new family.
"It doesn't matter how that life is in you," Pat says. "It matters how you nurture that life and allow it to grow in God's image in likeness, and go on with your life in a proper way." Pat has in years since given talks to young people which discuss, among other things, the challenges and beauty of adoption.
Around the year 1980, having been given his birth certificate by his adoptive mother, this son of Pat's, named Joe, began searching for his birth mother. With the advent of the internet, he began using online genealogy tools and was able to hunt down her contact information.
Pat tells the story:
"Late morning, I answered the telephone, and this soft, quiet voice said, 'This is not a business call, this is a personal call. My name is Joseph John Gongalski. I am calling looking for a Patricia Klingbeil. I was born at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida."
Pat cut across him at this point: "And you weighed seven pounds, four ounces."
As Pat tells it, Joe went "blubbery" at this point in the conversation.
They arranged for Joe, along with his wife and one of their sons, Matthew, to come to Pat's birthday party on March 17, an annual event which draws family from across the country and friends from across the Denver area, packing the house.
Joe and his family arrived a couple of days early, and Pat, in her usual Irish mischief, had an idea.
"I decided that I would pull a trick on him."
Grabbing Roger's old cane, she hobbled out the door, bent halfway over, and made her way meekly across the lawn, surrounded by family armed with cameras.
"When we saw the car pull up, I went out across the lawn. He had gotten out of the car and was coming in between the cars on the driveway. And I'm coming across the grass with the cane and I'm bent way over, like a real old lady."
From her feigned stoop, she could see Matthew over the cars.
"In that one glance, I could see his expression of, 'Oh my God, look at her.' It was just horror that was on his face!" she remembers, laughing.
"As Joe came out from between the cars, I threw the cane and ran to him."
When Joe shows the video to church groups, audiences typically believe they've witnessed a miracle.
"I think that was the cream of it all," says Pat, still laughing.
Joe and his wife Joanna now make regular visits to Pat from where they live in Michigan.
If you started from Pat's name on a family tree and counted all the members extending below her, you'd count over 100 names. Among them would be kids, grandchildren raised as her kids, great-grandkids not yet born, a whole family rejoined after Joe's search climaxed on her birthday one year: members lost, and members gained.
"See how God works," as she says.