A Mother's Strength

by Allie Pleiter

  “What’s this?” He looked around. “Did I forget we had a lesson?”

  “No, that’s Thursday after school.”

  Sawyer’s eyes widened just a bit at the realization that she had come to see him. Molly pushed aside how pleased he seemed to be at that. “Can we talk?” She’d noticed a bench under a tree a little ways away and nodded her head in that direction. She tried to keep her tone light and casual, but failed miserably.

  He caught it. “Everything okay? Has something happened to Zack?”

  You happened to Zack, she thought. “Zack is... having a bit of a time.” When Sawyer’s worry doubled, she was quick to add, “Nothing you did, just... Zack being Zack.” She sighed and passed him the coffee. “And me being me, I suppose.”

  “You worry a lot about him.” He said it so tenderly. As if it were a virtue instead of a burden.

  She cradled her own cup in her hands, grateful to have something other than Sawyer’s gentle eyes to look at. “He gives me a lot to worry about. Which isn’t helpful, because I don’t want to model a worrisome heart to him.” She stopped herself from going down that road. That wasn’t why she was here.

  Sawyer sat back against the bench. “I like him.”

  It seemed such an un-Sawyer-like thing to say that Molly’s throat tightened up. So many people’s affections for Zack seemed to come with qualifiers—“He’s a special boy.” “He’s misunderstood.” “He sees the world differently.” To simply like him felt like such a gift. It made it far harder to resist the giver.

  “He certainly likes you. Do you know what he told me the other night, after we put the golf holes in?”

  She’d almost texted him, but the remark could be so misconstrued she’d opted to wait and tell him in person. But then Monday had happened, and it seemed pointless.

  “What’d he say?”

  “I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but he said you make him feel less like an oddball. He meant it as a compliment,” she rushed to add.

  Sawyer’s eyes narrowed as he considered the backhanded compliment, then his face softened into another smile. “I’m glad, I guess.”

  She dove in. “We need to be careful. He’s had a hard life and we need to be careful.”

  “I get things are hard for him. I think that’s why...”

  She cut him off and dove in all the way. “I had cancer.”

  Sawyer closed his jaw midword. The declaration hung in the air between them, raw and uncomfortable.

  Molly took a deep breath and went on. “Just before Zack turned five I found a lump. It was malignant, and I went through surgery and radiation.” The words felt hard and sharp, as if they scraped her chest as they came out. Still, it wasn’t as bad as she had expected. She tried very hard to keep that part of her life tightly locked up in a little black box that hid behind her stalwart optimism. “Steve had already made his spectacular exit, so it was a very tough time for us. For him.”

  There was a long pause before Sawyer said, “That’s rough.”

  “It was. I tried hard not to let it affect Zack, but of course that was impossible.”

  “Stuff like that changes you. Leaves scars, even when it comes out okay.”

  She knew, without him explaining at all, that personal experience had taught him that truth. Zack saw a reflection of his own scars in Sawyer’s, even without knowing what Sawyer’s scars were or how they got there.

  He turned and looked at her for the first time in their conversation. Really looked at her. Those eyes. It wasn’t fair what his eyes did to her. “Are you okay?”

  That was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it? “Okay” had so many different definitions—which ones mattered most? The pull growing between them, the rebellious attraction she’d felt Saturday night made her want to shout, I’m complicated! in giant letters. Molly kept reminding herself there were so many reasons to keep a safe distance.

  Molly stayed within the safety of the facts. “I’ve been cancer-free for two years. Signs are all good. But there’s never any certainty in these things.” She took a long sip of her coffee, needing to get her feet back underneath her after the blow of that admission. “You always worry.”

  “Does Zack worry?”

  There were days where the weight of that question pressed her down. Where she felt her own body cursed Zack as much as it cursed her. In what world was it okay to give cancer to an overanxious little boy’s mom? What higher purpose could God possibly have in that? Pastor Newton told her not to think that way, but on some sleepless nights it was impossible not to. “Of course he worries.” Molly hated how close to tears those words brought her. “I’m all he’s got.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.” It wasn’t placating, the way he said it. She was somehow sure Sawyer was stopping himself from saying, “He has me.” His eyes looked like he had that thought. And yet, he of all people would respect the massive promise in those words.

  It gave her the opening she needed to say what she came to say. “Zack doesn’t depend on people. Life’s taught him he can’t. But for whatever reason, he’s decided to depend on you.”

  Sawyer knew that. She could see the knowledge in the way he tightened his jaw. It sat hard on the man.

  “I know you didn’t ask for that. But he’s connected with you.” She clutched the coffee cup so hard it bent closer to an oval than a circle. “And while I’m trying hard to be glad for that—and I am, truly—” she looked as straight into his eyes as she dared “—you need to know how easily that could break him. How careful you need to be with him. With his trust. If you let him down, I...” Molly broke her stare and swallowed hard against the threat of tears.

  “Molly.” He said nothing but her name. But the way he said it said everything. If she’d had any doubt of how strong the pull was growing between them—a pull she knew she had to ignore—the tone of his voice and his eyes confirmed it. If anything, it told her that coming here, saying this and making sure he knew how precarious things were for her and Zack, had been the right choice.

  “This has to be about Zack. I have to be sure you know that.” She wouldn’t come out and say, “It can’t be about me,” so she had to trust that her words got the message through. This would have been so much easier if there weren’t volumes behind his eyes, if he didn’t radiate that “lost but noble” soul vibe that always did her in.

  “Zack is the most important thing here,” he said. While the solemnity of his tone put her a bit at ease, it also implied Zack’s needs weren’t the only thing here. Was Sawyer’s telling choice of wording a skilled response or simple truth? It didn’t matter, as long as she came away from this conversation with the agreement that Zack was the most important thing. That would be worth admitting what she’d been through, admitting that the sunny optimism she showed the world didn’t come easy. Letting him know they couldn’t grow closer.

  He looked out over the pristine grounds of the golf course. “Funny how life can slice itself in two parts. How everything becomes before or after.”

  “I’ll have to let you know. I don’t feel like I’ve gotten to ‘after’ yet. I’m still mucking through from checkup to checkup.”

  Sawyer shook his head slightly at the words. “Mucking through. Yeah.” He was mucking through something of his own, that was obvious.

  With anyone else, Molly would have asked him to tell her about it. She’d have found ways to be encouraging, to share how her faith and her friends helped so much to pull her through.

  She couldn’t do that with Sawyer. Knowing the thing that pressed on him—and it was huge, whatever it was—would bring them closer. And she didn’t have a strong enough defense to keep that at bay. This had to be all about Zack.

  He looked like he might be mustering up the courage to say more, so Molly squared her shoulders and looked at her watch. “I should let you go.” Goodness, now whose choic
e of words was telling?

  “Thanks for the coffee.” The exchange felt absurdly mundane given the conversation they’d just had.

  “See you tomorrow at The Depot.”

  She turned to leave until he called, “Molly,” again. For a second she wondered if she could pretend she hadn’t heard him, but she was only few feet away. Molly had no choice but to turn and face him again.

  “He’s fortunate to have you. You’re a good mom.”

  The sincere compliment dug into her, sharp and sweet at the same time. Why had he said the one thing sure to drag down her defenses? “I’m trying.” I’m trying hard. I pray you’re a blessing to my son. The last thing Zack needs is more hurt.

  * * *

  Sawyer spent the rest of the day trying to figure out what had compelled Molly to meet him like she did. It only took the next day’s golf lesson to find out.

  Zack was moody, dark and prickly. Which made for terrible golf, so of course things spun quickly downward. Sawyer cut the lesson short to head for the clubhouse in search of pen and paper. Today’s time would be better spent making plans for the hippo cart than learning what irons and woods were for.

  “Grumpy golf isn’t worth playing,” he said as they walked through the clubhouse snack bar. It was crowded and noisy, so Sawyer led them through the building to camp out on the floor of the small banquet hall that sat at the far end.

  While it wasn’t an especially big room, Zack surprised Sawyer by opting to sit under the room’s grand piano. An odd choice of fort, granted, but Sawyer decided to play along and get down in between the instrument’s three ornately carved legs beside Zack.

  “Got any ideas for your hippo?” he said, trying to sound cheerful. It felt goofy.

  Zack just shook his head.

  “I got some from Mr. Walker, the guy who runs the carousel. Want me to show you?”

  Zack gave him a nod. A pouty nod, sure, but a nod.

  Sawyer took the paper and sketched out an idea built on what Wyatt Walker had told him. “What do you think?”

  “’S okay.” It lacked a certain enthusiasm. Sawyer found himself disappointed, but it wasn’t surprising given the boy’s dark mood.

  “Why do I get the feeling you’re not going to like any idea right now?”

  Zack said nothing, but pulled his knees up to his chin and wrapped his arms over his shins. He might as well have rolled himself up in a little ball like an armadillo. Did they have one of those on the carousel?

  He knew that feeling. If you got too far into that dark spiral, it was hard to climb back out. You certainly couldn’t talk your way out of it. No one could suggest you out of it—although he was certain Molly would try. For a rebellious moment, Sawyer imagined how Molly would look and what she would say to him if she were beside him in one of his darker moments. He liked the image. Too much.

  Shaking the warmth of that idea aside, Sawyer looked over his head at the underside of the piano. He knew what Molly would say about where he was right now. She would call this one of her “God things.” She’d see no coincidence in the fact that he was currently hunched under the very thing he used to use to pull him out of his dark moods. Up until recently, the piano had always been the coping mechanism to help him crawl back out of a funk.

  Why had he stopped playing altogether after the vehicle crash? He couldn’t really explain it. Maybe he was punishing himself, denying himself the pleasure of music as penance for sending that car into the corner of that building and ending those innocent lives. Talent was for worthy people. And he hadn’t felt worthy in months.

  Maybe because it was for Zack and not for him. Maybe that was what enabled him to crawl out from under the piano whether or not Zack followed him. If he couldn’t bring Zack to the rescue, the rescue would come to him.

  It felt ridiculous and shocking to sit down on the piano bench. Sawyer had the sensation of trespassing as he lifted the long shiny black cover off the keyboard. Part of him was afraid to touch the keys, to let his hands settle on them for fear they wouldn’t remember how.

  Instead, it came flooding back to him, and his foot found the pedal below without even thinking. Sawyer waited for the choice of music to slip out of his fingers, falling into place for a piece even before his conscious mind chose which song to play.

  Could he, still? Had his gift been stripped away like all the other joys in his life? The prospect of it all coming back to him was just as frightening as discovering it was gone.

  Sawyer closed his eyes, imagining the little ball of a boy hiding under the piano. Something low and soft. By instinct his fingers moved into the opening notes of a Joplin number called “Solace.” They hung soft and slow in the air at first, then began to tumble into higher notes in a minor key, picking up a little bit of momentum before hanging on cliffs of pauses and tumbling back down into the lower tones.

  He couldn’t see Zack, of course, but he could feel the boy’s surprise. “Solace” started out as a sad-happy ragtime song that nobody knew, then turned into a happy-sad song many people recognized.

  He messed up at least half a dozen measures, his memory stalling on a few parts so that the rhythm wasn’t anything close to consistent. The song sounded the way he knew Zack felt. Maybe even the way Sawyer felt, for his chest felt like a dusty old trunk someone had just pulled open.

  Sawyer didn’t dare stop, and he didn’t dare look down. He moved on through the song, hoping no one would come into the banquet hall at the sound of his extremely mediocre playing.

  At the end of the song, Sawyer caught sight of Zack’s small blue sneakers coming into view out from underneath the piano. The armadillo had unrolled himself a tiny bit.

  Emboldened, Sawyer let only a small silence fall between the end of “Solace” and the low notes that started the “Magnetic Rag.” He hit one of the lowest notes with an oversize emphasis, probably booming right over Zack’s head, and was rewarded with the smallest of giggles.

  By the end of the number, Zack was out from underneath the piano and gaping at him. Wide, stunned eyes stared at Sawyer from the floor. By the end of the “Pine Apple Rag,” Zack was perching his elbows on the end of the piano bench and staring, amazed, at Sawyer. By the time Sawyer started the “Maple Leaf Rag”—one almost everyone recognized—Zack was sitting on the piano bench next to him.

  Without thinking about it, Sawyer leaned playfully into Zack as he made a show of reaching across the boy for the high notes. Zack laughed, and Sawyer could barely believe he felt the same bubbling up out of his own chest. He missed note after note on the travels up and down the keyboard, and didn’t care. The perfection of the piece didn’t matter at all. What mattered was that he could still do it. He could still crawl into the complexities of ragtime piano, could still pull the cascades of notes out from his fingers.

  It hadn’t gone away. The music met him where he was—as it had always done—and took him away from the darker places. And he had shared that with Zack. I may not be worthy, he told himself as he caught Zack’s eye with a particularly silly trill of high notes, but I’m useful.

  He used to feel so useful. Important and necessary, a protector of a community. He’d become useless, allowed himself to be declared “no longer useful.” None of that had really changed, except that this moment took just a tiny bit of the old Sawyer back.

  He finished the number and let the final notes hang in the air. The importance of the moment—for reasons he couldn’t hope to explain—pounded against his chest.

  “Whoa!” Zack’s eyes were still wide.

  It fit. “Whoa, indeed,” Sawyer agreed.

  “You play the piano.”

  There was something amazing about Zack’s use of the present tense. I play the piano. Not I used to play. Sawyer found himself staring at his hands as if he had just been reintroduced to an ancient friend.

  “Play something else,” Zack pleaded.r />
  “Happy or sad?” It was a fair question. The best music matched your current mood. And he was rather curious which Zack would pick now.

  “Silly,” Zack replied after a moment of face-scrunching consideration.

  Sawyer cast back into his near-encyclopedic memory of ragtime piano tunes. “Dill pickles or frog legs?”

  “What?” Zack burst out laughing.

  “Choose. Dill pickles or frog legs?”

  It wasn’t hard to guess which a seven-year-old boy would choose. “Frog legs!”

  Sawyer felt a smile creep the whole way up from his feet as he launched into “Frog Legs Rag.” In a moment of inspiration, he had Zack crawl onto his lap and place his hands on top of his as they danced across the keyboard.

  It was the closest thing to joy he could remember feeling.

  “Do the pickle one!” Zack implored. The look in the boy’s eyes as he craned his neck back to look at Sawyer just about sliced Sawyer’s heart in half. The small heft of Zack’s head against his shoulder weighed everything and nothing at all.

  They laughed through “Dill Pickle Rag” and two more before the banquet room door opened and a shocked Molly stared as if the whole world had turned upside down.

  Chapter Nine

  Molly put an artful dollop of foam on a chai latte and looked at the clock again Friday morning. Sawyer would be here in ten minutes, and she still hadn’t found a way to talk to him about what had happened.

  Mostly because she didn’t really know what had happened. On the surface, Sawyer had played some music for Zack when he was in his funk. But those actions didn’t come close to explaining what had truly happened. Sawyer had found a way to reach through to Zack on his downward spiral and turn it around before it took him under.