Sarah's Choice

by Rebecca St. James

  “Oh, Mom, wait.” Sarah swallowed hard and picked up the paper she’d been contemplating when the phone rang. “I thought I had all the bills for MRMC on a payment plan, but I just got another one for three hundred and forty dollars.”

  Her mother’s voice fell. “I’m sorry. I got that too and I forgot to talk to you about it. Apparently an old invoice for one of your dad’s MRIs has been bouncing around the system.”

  “Mom, it’s been three years. How can they do that?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll call and set up separate payments—”

  “No. Don’t.”

  Agnes’s voice was practically inaudible at that point. One more ounce of stress and Sarah would be paying off her hospital bills too.

  “My holiday bonus is coming up,” Sarah said. “I’ll just pay it off with that and keep on with the other payments. Okay?”

  “Sweetie . . . thank you.”

  “I thought we agreed you’d already given me a blanket thank-you.”

  “I know but—”

  “We’re all doing our part.”

  Sarah was tempted to insert a hint about the promotion, but that could wait until she had it in writing. Besides, it was time to end this call. There was no denying the nausea now.

  “A mom couldn’t ask for a better pair of daughters.”

  “She could, but she wouldn’t find them. Love you, Mom.”

  “I love you too!” Matt called from the kitchen.

  Sarah checked for a dial tone. If Mom had heard that, she’d be in for a commentary tomorrow on the woman caught in adultery. Agnes always had an entire pile of stones at the ready for her.

  Matt appeared around the corner. “I made you some toast.”

  Sarah sniffed and gagged. “You burned me some toast. Baby, please get that out of here before I puke.”

  “You sick again?”

  “I’m serious!”

  Matt retreated, plate of blackened bread in hand. Sarah curled into a fetal position and breathed.

  “You can’t blame it on jalapeños this time, Sar,” Matt called from the kitchen. “Or my parents. What did your mom want?”

  My soul.

  “She wants me to go to church tomorrow.”

  Matt reappeared, pulling on a T-shirt. Too bad. Even in her pitiful state, the fact that bare-chested was a good look for him didn’t escape her.

  “That doesn’t sound so bad. I can do that.”

  Sarah lifted her head. “You don’t have to go.”

  “Will you still speak to me tomorrow night if I don’t?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Then there you go. And I’m not missing one of your mom’s dinners.”

  “She sure isn’t going to feed you if you show up for the party and not the church service.”

  Matt pulled her to a sitting position and kissed the top of her head. “I’m looking at it this way: while we’re hanging out at church, I might find some candidates for my new business opportunity.”

  Sarah moaned. “We already went through this at 1:00 a.m. It’s not a business; it’s a cell phone pyramid scheme.”

  “And I told you, there is absolutely no risk involved. It’s a liberal payout with minimal effort.”

  “Since when does life work that way?”

  Matt blinked down at her, and with good reason. The words had come out pointier than she intended. In fact, just last night she’d promised not to say them at all. A homily-heavy conversation with her mother always left her feeling like a porcupine.

  “Sorry,” she said. “This is about me, not you. I have to live in the real world.”

  “This real world?” Matt motioned to her personal bills still piled on the desk.

  “That’s the one.”

  “Here’s what we’re going to do with the real world today.” He pried the drawer open and with the side of his hand, swept the whole pile into it and shimmied it shut. “What are we having for dinner at your mom’s?”

  “Marshmallows.”

  Matt sank down next to her and pulled her into his lap. The daybed creaked. “I like Agnes.”

  “I like her too . . . when she isn’t doing her Billy Graham imitation. Are you sure you want to go with me?”

  “How else are you going to get there? Last I heard Buzz Lightyear was on his last wheels. Why did you name the thing that anyway?

  “It’s a TOYota. He was my favorite character in Toy Story. I was in high school when my dad bought it for me—why did you bring that up?”

  “Why won’t you let me work on it?”

  “Because you should be studying. And because I’m about to buy a new one.”

  “You deserve it, Sar.” Matt tilted her chin up and kissed her nose. “Just so you know, your mother can’t hold a candle to mine when it comes to running your life.”

  “I saw that.”

  “You didn’t see all of it. While you were getting your coat, she cornered me with the same stuff she keeps calling me about. She says my father wants me to come home for a ‘family’ Christmas.”

  “Oh. He didn’t say anything about that at dinner.”

  “That’s because it’s not his idea. It’s hers.”

  “Then I don’t understand—”

  Sarah stopped herself. The last time Matt went back to Philadelphia for the holidays he regressed so far he installed two sub woofers in his Camaro. Now she knew why.

  “Have you told her no?” Sarah said.

  “Like you tell your mother no? What if your dad were still around, though—would he do something like that?”

  “Okay. I get it,” Sarah said quickly. “Now don’t talk anymore.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if I just sit here perfectly still, I won’t throw up. I hate to throw up.”

  He tightened his arms around her. She was probably going to throw up anyway, but she just wanted a minute to sink into his cuteness and his niceness and not think about the fact that he wasn’t as good at keeping things in their compartments as she was. Come to think of it, he didn’t seem to have any. His life was more like a succession of jungle gyms and swing sets.

  “Matt,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Let go—”

  He did. Just in time for her to careen into the bathroom and give up the filet mignon.

  Chapter Six

  Matt spent the rest of the morning with his head under Buzz Lightyear’s hood. Sarah had hers under the toilet seat lid until she sent him out for ginger ale. Between that and the fast-emptying bottle of Pepto, she managed to make it past lunch without another bout. She was just about to fall into afternoon unconsciousness when her cell rang.

  “Hey!” Sarah said. She covered the phone with her hand and said to Matt, “It’s your Aunt Jerri.”

  Matt broke into an annoying rendition of an infant crying until Sarah shooed him back outside to the cold and the greasy rags.

  “I hear congratulations are in order,” Sarah said.

  Jerri gave what Sarah always thought of as a juicy laugh. She was that kind of person. You squeezed her and realness came out of her pores.

  “Yeah, surprise, right?” Jerri said. “But that’s not why I called. I want to hear about your dinner with the Evans Estate Thursday night.”

  Sarah could picture Jerri sitting in an almost lotus position, ready for Sarah to dish the dirt. Sarah was more than willing to fill her in.

  “What I totally don’t get,” Sarah said when they’d turned over every clump and analyzed it, “is how Matt came from those two people. I felt like I was in a bad movie with this stereotypical rich couple nobody would believe existed. And yet Matt is . . . good.” Sarah raked a hand through her hair. “Okay, I know he covers up a lot of insecurities with all the crazy stuff he does, but really—he’s just so decent. And they are so . . . not.”

  “I hear you. Jolene’s had so much work done she hardly bears any resemblance to herself anymore.”

  “She’s definitely got the Joan Rivers thing going on
.”

  “Oh yeah. And if it’s not that, it’s some physical ailment. She actually talked a doctor into removing her healthy gallbladder the week of Matt’s graduation from college. Just so she could show up and be the martyr. On pain meds.”

  This was making Agnes look better by the second.

  “Matt was just born good,” Jerri went on. “I didn’t know Jolene before she married Matthew Senior—Esquire, as he calls himself—but Clay said she was a lot like Matt is now and her husband just ruined her. Turned her into a society . . . she-wolf.”

  “He did a thorough job.”

  “I know, right? It was Clay who brought the good out in Mattie. He was more like a big brother than an uncle.” Jerri’s voice went soft. “Jolene has always been more about Matthew Senior’s daughters from his previous marriage than she is about her own kid. She didn’t know what to do with a boy. Clay did everything for him, and Matt was heartbroken when Clay and I moved from Philadelphia to here when Matt was in high school. I know we’re the reason he came to Illinois to go to college. Clay has just always felt like he needed to look after him.”

  “Thank heaven,” Sarah said.

  A silence fell, something unusual in a conversation with Jerri.

  “Look, Sarah,” she said finally, “I really wanted to make sure Jolene and Esquire didn’t run you off. You’re good for Matt.”

  Sarah felt herself tighten. “We have a lot of fun together.”

  “Fun.” Jerri gave a grunt that was as succulent as her laugh. “I was afraid of that.”

  “I don’t follow,” Sarah said.

  “Matt has a hard time showing who he really is. He’s never gotten past what his parents tell him he is, no matter what Clay tries to do for him. He doesn’t even try to get their approval—he gave up on that a long time ago. But he doesn’t see how he can be anything, really, if he can’t be what they want him to be.”

  Sarah knew where Jerri was taking her. And she didn’t want to go there.

  “You, on the other hand, obviously have it all together, and Matt respects you. Am I making any sense at all?”

  Too much sense. About the wrong thing.

  “We definitely balance each other out, if that’s what you mean.” Sarah knew her voice sounded as high and strained as a middle schooler lying to her mother. “He shows me how to loosen up, and I show him that there’s actually a serious side to life.”

  Jerri grunted again, with less juice this time.

  “I sense we’ve gotten into none-of-my-business territory,” she said. “So—what I’m hearing is that Jolene and his majesty didn’t turn you off to the clan completely?”

  “Not at all,” Sarah said. “And listen, thanks for the insights.”

  “For what they’re worth,” Jerri said.

  The disappointment leaked through as she hung up, and Sarah felt a pang. That would have been a great conversation if she thought there was any future in understanding where Matt came from. Maybe there would be someday. But for now, and for a while to come, Matt and marriage couldn’t be in the same sentence. She just hoped she hadn’t sounded too snarky with Jerri. She liked her. She liked Clay.

  She liked Matt.

  They were late getting to the service Sunday morning. Matt couldn’t leave Catfish in the apartment parking lot with a dead battery. He gave him a jump while Sarah hid in the bathroom.

  “Hey, thanks dude,” Catfish said when Matt had his aluminum can of a ’93 Buick running. If you could call it that. The engine was only banging on four cylinders, and the thing was a V-8. “I owe ya.”

  Matt considered asking him to take it out of Sarah’s rent, but he didn’t want to bring it up. She had already downed what was left of a bottle of Pepto just to get out of bed with that bug she had. She didn’t need this kid in her doorway smelling like last week’s laundry.

  “It’s all good,” Matt said. “Just don’t shut it off until you get where you’re going.”

  He made sure the land yacht had rounded the corner before he texted Sarah that it was safe to come out. She looked amazing—some kind of flowy dress thing with her hair all shiny and her legs taut in a pair of heels. If she hadn’t still looked a little green around the gills, he would have stopped her for a kiss. Besides, she informed him they were late enough already.

  “Like you care about us getting there on time,” Matt said.

  “I don’t. My mother does.”

  Yeah, better not to give Agnes a reason to pour on any more guilt. Must be a mother thing.

  Matt made good time getting from Oak Park to Elmhurst where the church was, but there wasn’t a space left in its acres of parking lot even though the thing was big enough to hold the crowd at a U2 concert.

  “Is it always this crowded?”

  “Just at Christmastime when the people who only come one season a year show up.” Sarah gave a grunt. “Like us.”

  Matt finally located a spot on the street two blocks up and let Sarah haul him down the icy sidewalk. He liked the back view of her. When they slipped inside the vestibule, amid a forest of poinsettias that looked like someone had robbed a florist shop, she was the one who stopped him and gave him a pillowy kiss.

  “Thanks for coming with me,” she whispered. “I don’t know if I could have done this alone.”

  He pulled her closer. “It’s not like I’m gonna miss football or anything.”

  “No games today?”

  “Only the last of the regular season.” He gave her a martyred look.

  She gave him the nose wrinkle and glared past the Christmas tree at the door between them and the sanctuary. “At least you didn’t have to put up with this every week like I did growing up.”

  Before he could correct that, she sighed and pushed open the door.

  Okay, so it wasn’t every week, but he’d done his share of squirming in a pew when he was a kid, because his father made them go: Belonging to a church and a country club is good for business, was the rationale.

  And the experience wasn’t all bad. As he and Sarah stood in the back, craning their necks for sight of the Collins clan, Matt couldn’t help remembering the Christmas pageants he was in until they barred him from participation because he always stole the scene from the Holy Family in his self-styled roles as a rapping shepherd or a break-dancing camel. It used to tie his father’s jaw muscles into square knots.

  “There they are,” Sarah whispered and padded off down the side aisle.

  Agnes had saved them a place in, of course, the front and on the other side of her, which meant they had to climb over Justin, Sarah’s brother-in-law, and Denise, her sister, and their two munchkin boys, not to mention Agnes herself. The shaking of hands and kissing of cheeks and pinching of kid noses were enough to stop the entire service until they got settled, but the pastor continued to preach . . .

  “ ‘How will this be,’ Mary asked the angel, ‘since I am a virgin?’ ”

  Now there was a line to come in on.

  Matt finally got himself squeezed in between Sarah and an eighty-ish woman who also insisted on shaking Matt’s hand with her knotty one. By then he became aware that the pastor was way into his sermon. Somewhere around point 2.

  “ ‘The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age.’ ”

  Matt suppressed a grin. Impossible not to think of Aunt Jerri.

  “ ‘Nothing is impossible with God.’ ”

  Dude. Was this guy reading his mind? Matt gave him a closer look and almost blurted out, Hey, I know him! Where had he seen him before?

  Next to him Sarah’s body felt like a steel rod, but she was almost smiling at the pastor.

  “What’s this guy’s name?” Matt whispered to her.

  “Reverend Al Smith.”

  Didn’t ring any bells.

  “ ‘I am the Lord’s servant,’ Mary answered. ‘May it be to me as you
have said.’ Then the angel left her.”

  The reverend closed his Bible. Matt moved his lips closer to Sarah’s ear.

  “I know him from someplace.”

  “I’ve known him since I was five.”

  Sarah let the smile glimmer for a minute. Reverend Al obviously wasn’t the reason she’d given up church. Matt had never asked her why she had. That topic was as off-limits as talking about her father. She’d cut off that subject just yesterday morning.

  “Today I want you to look at this story beyond the familiar words to the reality. Put yourself in the place of that little Judean girl, who couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen.”

  Sorry, Rev. I’m gonna have a little trouble pulling that off.

  “She was young and innocent, but not so naive as to be unaware of the implications of her decision.”

  Ya think? Matt leaned forward on his knees. This guy had a way of making you feel like you were in a one-on-one conversation with him. Where the Sam Hill had he seen him before? A little on the chubby side, balding, quirky mouth—

  “She had more to worry about than disappointed parents and an angry fiancé.”

  Matt nodded. From the time he was a teenager and finally got this part of the story, he always felt like you had to hand it to Joseph for hanging in there with Mary.

  “Her life literally hung in the balance. There was an excellent chance that she would be stoned to death when she began to show.”

  Tough crowd back then.

  Matt glanced at Sarah. Man, she was beautiful when she was intent like that. Made him want to get this cell phone thing going, make some decent money.

  Take care of her.

  Whoa.

  He pulled himself back to the good rev.

  “What could she tell that angry mob? That she had a vision? That an angel had appeared to her?”

  Yeah, not so much.

  “Do you think they would have believed that? Would that have stopped the stones?”

  As if on cue, a scuffle ensued in the pew. Justin and Denise’s boys were going at it on the floor like Junior WWE.

  Without taking their eyes off the pulpit, Denise grabbed the little one by the seat of his pants and Justin got the other one by the collar. They were plunked down on either side of their parents before Reverend Al could even move on to point 3. Slick.