Sara's Dilemma

by Erica Michaels

  Soon, they arrive back at the bar, where Erik has his motorcycle parked, a sleek BMW with silver on the sides.

  “Could I…could I get your number?” Erik says.

  Sara isn’t used to hearing him stumble in his words, and wonders if this is the one part of the night he didn’t have planned. She pauses, wracking her brain for some excuse that would make it okay to give her number to a man she isn’t married to.

  “Actually, here,” Erik says after the silence, searching his pocket and pulling out a stray receipt and a pen. He scribbles on the back of the paper and passes it to Sara. “This is my number. If you want to reach out to me, great. If not, I’ll take the message and won’t try to talk to you. There are no obligations or hidden meanings…I just think…maybe we could both use a friend. And I’d love to speak with you again.”

  Sara looks at the slightly crumbled receipt in her hand. On the back she sees the 10 digits written shakily in thin air. On the front is the logo of the Saloon, with “VODKA TONIC” written in all caps, the total price, a generous tip, and Jasper’s imitation of an “Erik Bondar” signature.

  “Have a good night,” Erik says after she doesn’t say anything. He pauses for a moment before her, as if he wants to give her a hug or something, but instead just lightly taps her shoulder, puts on a black helmet, and climbs on the motorcycle.

  She knows her hotel is just a quick walk across the street, but Sara waits there for a few moments, watching Erik disappear in the night.

  Back to the Grind

  That must have been a dream, Sara thinks when her alarm goes off the next morning at 5am. She’d gotten maybe four hours of sleep, between thinking of Erik and worrying about the meeting she’d have. She rolls from her bed to the table in the room, not even bothering to pull off her pajamas before opening her laptop and typing away.

  Three hours, she thinks. That’s how long she has before this code needs to be done for the next meeting.

  Erik, she thinks next, wondering what he’s doing. Then a fast, No, you don’t have time for that.

  The day carries on and Sara drifts into autopilot, like she so often does when she’s in the midst of a long day like this. Every now and then, she checks her phone, almost wishing she’d receive a message from Erik, but of course, he gave her the number, and at any rate, the receipt with his digits on it is still sitting on the nightstand in her hotel room.

  When she finally gets back to her hotel room at 10:30pm, she collapses in bed. Then slowly rolls over, looking at the receipt next to her lamp. She looks at the numbers again and saves them as a contact in her phone.

  “Erik Bondar,” she says as she types it in.

  She opens a new text message and types, “Thinking of you.” The cursor blinks at her for several moments before she backspaces. “Long day at work,” she writes, and then backspaces again. She spends several minutes staring at her blank screen before typing out, “Long day at work. Would have been nicer to be with you.”

  She looks at this new message, contemplating if it seems friendly or flirtatious, if she shouldn’t send it so late at night. In one quick breath, she presses send and lays back on the bed.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid, she thinks, feeling like some silly schoolgirl for ruminating on a text message for so long. Just when she thinks Erik didn’t want her to reach out at all, her phone buzzes.

  Erik Bondar, the screen reads, and her heartbeat speeds up a few beats.

  “I was just thinking of you,” the message reads. “I’m sorry you had such a long day…I would have liked seeing you too.”

  A small smile stretches across Sara’s face, and she holds her phone to her heart, falling asleep thinking of Erik’s green eyes.

  Innocent Texting

  A few days later, on Thursday, Sara is in a work meeting.

  “Corporate client changing the project again,” Sara types out under the table.

  “Asshole!” Erik responds right away.

  “His toupee is almost sliding off his head as he walks around the room.”

  “Ha-ha…too bad he can’t hire you to program a better head of hair.”

  Sara almost laughs at this but keeps her face flat and unaffected. She’s never texted during work meetings before, but as she learned yesterday, the men in the meeting don’t actually notice that much and she’s been finding the meetings much more enjoyable to share with Erik. It seems every meeting hashes out undoing the same changes that they’d discussed last week, and Sara has gotten exasperated with the project. At this point, she’s written enough code for a dozen bank security systems, but the bank still insists on changes, which is why the project has dragged on for so long.

  Over the last few days, Erik and Sara have been texting more and more. Sometimes Erik will send a picture — his handsome stubble in the morning before he shaves, the mountain he just hiked, the desert sunset he got to see from his motorcycle. Sara will respond with awe, but hasn’t sent any pictures, feeling like the bags under her eyes have become permanent and ought not to be photographed.

  Yesterday, they texted so much it felt like Erik had spent the day with her. Her days have been boring — too much work, too many meetings, too many pages of code, but somehow Erik never seemed bored by them. He keeps asking how she is, asking specific questions about the code and the client’s wishes, and for the first time in years, Sara felt like someone actually knew what was going on with her life. Well, at least the work part.

  “Come with me on a motorcycle ride this weekend.”

  Sara opens the text during her lunch hour and puts down her phone immediately.

  I’ll be in Flagstaff this weekend, she thinks. It’s a thought she’d been avoiding all week. Though her work was draining and overwhelming, she preferred it over being home. Home was where her husband and son ignored her, where she felt even more invisible. At least at work, she could be useful.

  She doesn’t respond to Erik for several hours. The whole “I have a husband and son” conversation hadn’t come up yet. It wasn’t so much that she was avoiding it as it wasn’t something she wanted to talk about, with herself or with Erik.

  “Hope the rest of your day has been alright. Wish you were here,” Erik writes around dinnertime, along with a picture of Phoenix’s Mummy Mountain attached, no doubt the place Erik had adventured today.

  She types back, “I’ll be in Flagstaff this weekend — I only live out of a hotel five nights a week, after all.”

  It’s 8pm now and Sara is just getting back to the hotel. She collapses on the bed and looks at the ceiling. Ordinarily, she’d be driving back to Flagstaff on Friday, but because she had to work on Sunday, her weekend got shifted earlier. At least I can wait until the morning, she thinks, feeling the ache in her shoulders from so many hours of working.

  Her phone buzzes and thinking it’s Erik, she reaches for it immediately.

  Instead, the screen reads “Raymond Perlinger.”

  Her husband.

  “Rocco’s sick. Can you come home tonight?” the message reads.

  It’s the first time she’s heard from her husband all week. Her eyes sting just reading the message and thinking about the two and a half hour drive ahead of her. Her mind flickers back to Erik, to the Sunday evening at the gay bar, and it feels like a lifetime ago.

  She types back, “Sure. Be there by 11.”

  As her body shifts into autopilot, she puts the last of her clothes into her bag, and zips it up. She glances in the mirror, barely noticing the way her hair has frizzled throughout the day or how her eyes are red around the edges. Looking one more time around the room to make sure she hasn’t forgotten anything, she leaves, putting her hotel card key at the front desk before walking out the front door into a breezy autumn night.

  Her phone buzzes again, a message from Raymond, but she doesn’t read it. She climbs into her car and drives the whole two and a half hours in silence.

  Sara Versus Raymond

  For Sara, it seemed to happen suddenly — both her hu
sband’s distance and her son becoming adolescent. It seemed one month her son had sunshine in his eyes and said “I love you” every night before bed, just as he always had since he learned how to talk. Then, around 13, he became cold, only interested in texting his friends and watching YouTube videos. As for Sara’s husband, Raymond, it seemed one day they were honeymooning and in love, sharing all the feelings of their heart, and then some time into her busy schedule, she noticed that they barely spoke at all. Sara knows it must have happened gradually — teenage hormones don’t set in overnight, and distant husbands don’t lose interest after a singular 18-hour shift, but it felt that way. It seemed as soon as Sara noticed these changes in her life, it was too late to change them, and no matter how she reached out with warmth to Rocco or Raymond, she was met with coldness, and her job had her away so much, she felt exhausted most of the time anyway.

  It was a year ago that Sara started sleeping in the guest room. It wasn’t because of an explosive argument — Raymond and she didn’t argue with any malice. More so, one day Raymond said he couldn’t fall back asleep after Sara came in so late at night from work, and why doesn’t she sleep in the guest room. Sara didn’t argue. It would seem like a practical negotiation, and maybe in some marriages wouldn’t have even been a sign of an unhealthy relationship, but Sara knows that there is much more unspoken in the silence, and she’s sure Raymond knows it too. Neither of them is willing to break the silence first, though.

  When Sara comes home Thursday night, around 11pm, she feels surreal, almost like she is living in the dream of someone else’s life. She floats through the door to their small home in Flagstaff, murmurs some greeting to her husband who is watching late night television on the couch, gets some update about Rocco’s sickness, floats to the bedroom to take Rocco’s temperature, and tries to feed him medicine. Sometime in the night, she helps clean up Rocco’s vomit, then goes back to bed in the guest room.

  By the time she blinks open her weary eyes and enters the kitchen the next morning, Raymond and Rocco have already eaten breakfast and are busy with their respective tasks — Raymond, probably answering work emails and Rocco on his phone. Clearly feeling less sick, she thinks of Rocco. Stifling a yawn, Sara glances at her phone, thinking she will just be checking the time, but instead finding a notification from Erik. She shuts the screen quickly, glancing around as if someone had been looking over her shoulder.

  Please, she thinks to herself, it’s not as if you’re having some affair.

  “How are things in Flagstaff?” the message reads.

  Sara looks up from her phone and looks at the bags under her son’s eyes, probably mirroring her own, the blank look of her husband glowing from his computer screen. She looks back at her phone, staring at it for maybe twenty seconds, remembering the vomit from the night before, and the way she didn’t even bother to ask Raymond if he’d help, since she knew he wouldn’t. What on Earth could she tell Erik? He didn’t even know she had a husband, much less a teenage son.

  “Got to sleep in a bit, which was nice. Was up in the night, though,” she responds, trying to stay as truthful as possible while leaving out the parts she couldn’t say over text. “How are you?” she adds at the end, hoping to divert the conversation.

  She makes herself eggs and toast, sitting at the table and staring off blankly.

  “How was your week?”

  She looks up to see her husband has come from his computer and is sitting across from her. She examines him now, wondering if he always looked this old, seeing the salt and pepper flakes in his brown hair. Then, with surprise, she notices the look in his eyes.

  They seem…caring, she thinks, wondering why it felt so rare to see him look like that.

  “It was…”

  Surprising? Exciting? Surreal? she wants to say, thinking of Erik.

  “Exhausting,” she finishes, lingering on the feelings she associated with work, the parts of the week that included staying past hours and managing last-minute code.

  “Thanks for taking care of him last night,” Raymond says, his eyes glancing in the direction of Rocco lost in his phone.

  “Oh…” Sara isn’t used to being thanked by her husband; she’s taken off guard. “Well, what is a mother for,” she finishes.

  But working 14-18-hour days, living out of a hotel, and missing all the fun aspects of family in service of them…

  “How was your week?” she asks, trying out the question as if it were some unfamiliar food, she was eating for the first time.

  Raymond shrugs, “Same old, same old,” he responds. “In and out of the firm, carting Rocco off to soccer.”

  Sara nods.

  “Listen, I was going to go watch the game at Steve’s house, and Rocco has practice coming up in a couple hours, says he’s feeling well enough to go. Could you take him?” Raymond asks.

  Of course, he has a favor to ask — that’s why he came to talk to me.

  Sara nods, already feeling herself receding.

  “Great, see you tonight,” he says, grabbing the keys from the counter and running out the door.

  Sara brings the toast to her mouth and sets it down again, suddenly not as hungry as she thought she was.

  “Rocco — do you have all your gear ready for practice?” she asks.

  “Yes, mom,” he says, without looking up.

  She sighs, standing, and strays to the windows in the kitchen, looking at the vines of the hanging plants falling limply in front of the glass. They used to be so lush and vibrant, but of course, Raymond and Rocco couldn’t be expected to water them while she was away. She suddenly felt the urge to call Erik, to tell him everything, to receive some care and comfort in his listening. She knew he’d listen well, and for a minute, she was almost convinced that it’d be a good idea to call him.

  You barely just met the man; she thinks to herself a minute later. That’d be too much to put on him.

  She checks her phone though and smiles at seeing his name across her screen.

  “Hope you had sweet dreams and have some time to relax. Maybe with enough rest, you’d be up for an adventure next week? Some place like this?”

  Attached to the message is another stunning view from the top of a mountain. She catches herself gleaming at the photo, wishing Erik’s face was part of it, and holding her phone to her chest.

  “Maybe we could both use a friend,” she hears his voice in her head, a memory from the first and only time they met.

  If you’re just friends, why haven’t you told him about your husband and son? she thinks.

  To not burden him, says a voice of denial in her head.

  Or is it because…

  She shuts the feeling of fluttering from her heart and places her phone on the counter.

  You’re a married woman, Sara, she thinks to herself. Then the other voice comes in, saying,

  For all you know, Raymond’s off having an affair right now.

  And,

  Who would blame him?

  She shuffles upstairs to change her clothes, trying to turn off the argument in her head, but it follows her for an hour or more. She doesn’t respond to Erik, at least not right away, but she itches too. She only wishes she had something to say that wasn’t “I want to have an affair with you.”

  Later, driving Rocco to his soccer practice, she distracts herself a little by trying to have a conversation with him. He responds only with one-word answers, though, and soon she is out of questions and doesn’t want him to feel like he’s in an interview.

  When night falls, and Raymond comes back home around 10pm, only to head straight to his room, Sara lingers in the hallway, looking at the door that used to be the door to their marriage bed. Under the crack of the door, she sees the light dance with the movement of Raymond’s feet. She can almost picture her husband on the other side of the door now, getting undressed, getting ready for bed. Maybe he pauses for a moment to contemplate the woman who used to share his bed. Maybe he even wonders where all the time went and why t
hey feel more like strangers now. Mostly though, Sara suspects he doesn’t give her a single thought.

  And she thinks, who would blame me?

  Work or Play?

  “It’s just that we need the security to flow through seamlessly and still be top notch.”

  Sara’s fingers come to the bridge of her nose in exasperation. She normally wouldn’t so outwardly show her frustration, but this client has been changing their demands nearly every week.

  “That’s the code we had about two weeks ago,” says one of her fellow programmers.

  “Yes, but that sent the security questions to a separate department — we can’t have that because our customers would be on hold for too long if there was any suspicion of fraud,” says their client.

  “But housing everything under the same department would make the banking not as secure,” Sara’s coworker explains. “We went over this last week.”

  The argument goes on for only a few seconds more before Sara and her coworker begin conceding to the customer’s demands. There is only so much arguing you can do with the client who is paying you.

  At this point I could have started my own bank, Sara thinks, calculating all the time she’s spent in Phoenix on this project and all the money the bank must have paid to bring her here.

  As she exits the meeting, she pulls out her phone to check her calendar. No more meetings today, she realizes. She looks at her to-do list — stray edits on different code from the company for other projects, some emails, brand new code from the meeting she just had. Distracted, she opens the message from Erik.

  “Driving up to Prescott today for a meeting — want to come with?”

  She begins to type out a message that starts with “Sorry, I can’t,” but then pauses. Her tasks aren’t all that time sensitive, and she has no more meetings. “What time?” she ends up writing instead.