Kirsten came into the office breakroom about fifteen minutes after Sarah Worden to find her alone at one of the tables, picking at her food in a plastic container and staring off into space. She obviously had a lot on her mind.
Six years ago Sarah lost her husband Joe in a traffic accident. The delivery truck he was driving down a remote road one morning nearly collided with a car driven by a young woman trying to drive and text on her cell phone at the same time. The truck swerved off the road and wrapped around a tree, killing him instantly.
Sarah and her two sons, Joey, then three, and Patrick, eighteen months, were left behind. But her family, including her widowed mother Eileen as well as many of her friends and coworkers including Kirsten volunteered to help during her loss with comfort and other needs. Times were hard, of course. But Sarah eventually found the strength to pull her family through together.
“What's goin' on?” Kirsten asked.
Sarah looked over to her and smiled. Despite her pockmarked face and glasses she wore, Kirsten always thought she looked so pretty when she smiled with her short brunette hair and piercing blue eyes.
“You'd probably think I'm losing my mind.” She set her container aside and took a sip of her iced tea. “How's Kaylee?”
Kaylee was Kirsten's three-year-old daughter, a bowtied and ponytailed bundle of energy who often proved to be a handful to her single mom. “You know Kaylee. If it ain't one thing it's another. This time it's the dirt in the flower garden out back.”
Sarah laughed and smiled again. She adored little Kaylee. But she knew she couldn't change the subject any longer.
“Something weird's going on with Mike. He and Mom have got Joey and Patrick involved in this big surprise for me. My boys won't tell me a thing.”
Kirsten listened. “What do you suppose it is?”
“All Mom could tell me is it's something Mike's been tinkering around in his workshop, saying it'll give me a second chance to be happy.”
Mike was Michael Wells, a retired physics professor from the university who Eileen had been intimiately involved with over the past two years, starting as her secretary. She told Sarah when their relationship started getting serious that it was the best second chance she ever had.
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“How often do you get one of those?” she asked Sarah.
Mike was a handsome gent who seemed to Sarah to be just right for Eileen. Like her he was in his early sixties. Tall, lean, with salt-and-pepper hair combed back, wearing bifocals. He had a very intelligent and reassuring face Eileen loved.
On their first date, Eileen was moved to learn that Mike was also a widower with no children for many years. Since his wife's death, he threw himself into science and teaching, which won him a number of awards and notoriety from the scientific community. But nowadays his desire was for another chance at love and a family. And she found Mike to be a kid at-heart when she introduced him to her grandsons Joey and Patrick. He took them on several adventurous outings: fishing, camping, flying kites at the beach, sledding in the winter. He was also very good with tools and built a huge facsimile of one of the old space capsules from when Sarah was a little girl out of some scrap metal, old wires and electronic equipment he always found on trips to scrapyards. Joey and Patrick played lots of make-believe adventures in that capsule.
“And that's not the only thing that's weird.” Sarah continued. “Every time I pick up the boys from Mom's, I've found them playing with toys I haven't seen since I was their age. Like last Monday when I found Patrick playing with a slinky on the stairs. A slinky!”
“Yeah, I remember my little brother with one of those.” Kirsten said.
“And Joey was in the living room with a toy aircraft carrier that shoots these little plastic planes with a rubber band.” She made an example of their size with her thumb and forefinger. “He was having a ball with it.”
“Well Mike or your Mom probably found it at a yard sale or thrift store somewhere. Your Mom does buy a lot of clothes from the Salvation Army.”
Kirsten always had a therapist's ear. Though she never actually became one, she read a lot of self-help and personal improvement books, remembering that one of the first symptoms of neurotic adult children is a vivid imagination.
“But this looked brand new. The box looked like it had just been taken off the shelf at the toy department. It even had the plastic cover. And I looked it up on the computer last night. The company that makes them went out of business thirty years ago.”
“Sarah, you don't think. . .” But she continued.
“And it's not just with the boys. When I was at Mom's helping her cook dinner that Sunday, I took a package of hamburger from the freezer and saw the label. The price was a dollar eighty-seven for five pounds! Where on earth do you get five pounds of hamburger at a dollar eighty-seven?”
“Sarah.” Kirsten intervened. Now this was getting out of hand, she thought. She put her hand over Sarah's.
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“Aren't you getting worked up over nothing?”
Sarah calmed down a bit and took another sip of her iced tea. She looked at the clock and saw she had two minutes left in her lunch break and was ready to head back.
“You're right. I told you you'd think I've lost my mind.” she said.
“You have!” Kirsten laughed. “You're just having anxiety over your mother being involved with somebody. You should be happy for her. She was right was she said about second chances. How often do you get to be happy again?”
Sarah slung her handbag on her shoulder and adjusted her glasses. Kirsten took both of her hands, looked into her blue eyes and gave a reassuring smile. “It'll all be okay.”
Sarah smiled back. How she needed Joe now more than ever to help her understand these feelings.
As she headed for the door she turned to Kirsten, “You know, I always hated surprises.”
“I know.” Kirsten replied. “But maybe this'll be a good one.”
Sarah pulled her car into her mother's driveway a little before seven that evening. It was late September and the sun was starting to set, the sky turning navy blue. From her car she could see strange colored lights through the window of the detached garage that served as Mike's workshop.
A time machine? The crazy thought emerged in her mind like a daisy sprouting up through the lawn. Mike was always coming up with crazy ideas about traveling through time and second chances to right things that went wrong and such. With him anything was possible. But for right now she just wanted to get her sons and go home.
“Mommy!” cried Patrick, running out of the house into her arms as she got out of the car. She picked him up, hugged him and kissed him. He was beginning to look so much like Joe it sometimes startled her, with his sandy brown hair and brown eyes full of innocence. He even had those same dimples in his cheeks she always fell in love with whenever he smiled.
“Have you been good for Gramma and Mike?” she asked. But instead of answering, Patrick only spoke two words.
“Daddy's home.”
“What? Daddy's home? What do mean by that, baby?” She was totally caught off guard. She was so touched by how much he missed his father, even though he barely remembered him. Just then Joey, his dark, curly-haired older brother, came running out.
“You blabbermouth!” he screamed. “This was supposed to be a surprise!”
“Now, now.” Sarah intervened. “What's going on, Joey?”
Just then she saw Mike coming out of the garage. “Hi, Sarah.” he said. “Your mother
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and I have something really special for you inside.”
“What?” Sarah demanded, raising her hands. “Screw all this secrecy. You know I hate surprises! I'm not taking one more step until either of you tell me what' going on here right now!”
Then Eileen came out through the back door and joined Mike. He put his arm around her.
“Sarah, darling.” she began. “When I fell in love with Mike I never thought it could happen to me again. Never in my wildest dreams. But it did.”
They turned and looked into each other's eyes and smiled.
“But you're the love of my life, too. And it just isn't fair that I should get this chance and not you.”
Mike turned to Joey and Patrick, who were ready to lock horns while Sarah was trying to seperate them. “Boys, whadaya say you both help me get things squared away in the shop and let you mom and Gramma talk, huh?”
They turned and left, going into the shop together while Sarah and Eileen stayed outside. She brushed Sarah's hair back and caressed her cheek, giving that same motherly smile she always gave whenever her daughter was feeling down. She took her by the hand and they walked together toward the back of the house.
“C'mon.” Eileen motioned.
My entire family's gone crazy, she thought. This is my worst nightmare.
As they reached the back porch, Joe came out. The same Joe, with the sandy brown hair and deep brown eyes. Even those same dimples she always loved whenever he smiled. All of it lost six years ago that morning on that lonely stretch of road.
But Joe wasn't smiling now. He seemed just as frightened as Sarah was, as if he'd somehow been plucked from one particular place in time and put into another.
“Hi, Sarah.” he said.
The emotions ran through Sarah like a raging flood. She began to feel so weak she could hardly stand.
“J-Joe?” she asked.
Her legs gave way and she fainted.
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A Little Breathing Room
Man Camp Page 4