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Chapter 1
Many of us crucify ourselves between two thieves- regret for the past
and fear of the future.
Fulton Oursler
Alone she sat, on the cold tile floor. The Dijon colored floor of the Walnut Grove Inn was icy and made her already shaking legs more uncontrolled. She wrapped her arms around her bent legs-hoping somehow to console herself. Her self-embrace offered no comfort. Her thoughts were racing, reeling. How did this happen? What would this mean for her future? She felt alone, she felt trapped, and she felt afraid. Soon the idyllic postage-stamped sized town she grew up in would have the news scattered over the next three counties. And she still didn’t know how she was going to face this herself, let alone tell her boyfriend. Their relationship was never supposed to go this far.
She was used to sleeping around, she was a heavy partier and was used to men using her, especially in the last year when she attended a major state university four hours away from her hometown. During her senior year of high school an amazing guy had swept her off of her feet. N’s tanned, medium build, dark wavy hair had been on her mind ever since homecoming when they had been named homecoming King and Queen. He was new to town, but his family fit in well with the local town socialites and was readily accepted as the new all-star quarterback for the Bulldogs. Her mother approved of him and it made her mom proud that S was dating a local athletic star. The Bulldog football team was a huge part of the K family’s life: S's grandfather coached the first team and they went on to win two state championships during his coaching career.
N was unlike anyone S had ever met in this Lilliputian town. Until she had met him, there was no one who even caught her eye. They had met after a bake sale, where her mom had spent all day in the school cafeteria kitchen making raised doughnuts. Grinning, he sidled up to her in the cafeteria and winked, with glazed icing crusted around the corners of his lips. “Your Mom sure makes a mean doughnut, S.” It wasn’t long after that that the two began dating. He was a perfect match with her quiet and bookish nature and they balanced each other well. It was the happiest time in her life; she felt secure in who she was, she had a great boyfriend, a solid plan for her future, and the world blossomed before her feet, like a field of poppies.
That was before she caught N sleeping with one of her best friends in the backseat of his car after football practice one night. Devastation washed over her when the pieces began to surface that he had been playing her like a fiddle for the last year. That was the start of her heart being used up, and she refused to trust another man again. She enrolled at University of Missouri the next fall to get away from the memories of her first true love. She determined she would pour herself into her books to study for a veterinarian’s license; but she hadn’t anticipated that her heart wasn’t ready for the pressures of a notorious partying campus. Slowly, somewhere, she told herself that she wasn’t worthy of true love after N and that if she had been worth it, he wouldn’t have felt the need to sleep with one of her best friends.
After a wild year of partying around, sleeping around and doing very little studying, her world changed in a pivotal way during the summer of 1979. It was a call that came in the wee hours of the dawn from a state trooper indicating that they had extracted her brother’s body from a vehicle that had been thrown nearly two hundred feet. He was unconscious and had was found to be well over the legal limit for alcohol consumption.
Her brother’s drunk driving accident that had left him paralyzed from the waist down, had thrust her entire family in the throws of horror as they watched their beloved son and brother fight for his life with every waking minute. Her mother never left her brother T’s side, devoted to her son with the same constancy and love, as countless mothers in history have been when it came to a mother’s love for her son in the face of danger. The tragedy had left the young woman torn between her college studies and her need to be by her brother’s side. She wanted to finish her pre-veterinary degree, but closer to home she assured her parents. T was more important. It was a relief to have a valid excuse to put those memories of her wild partying at Mizzou behind her and try to move on from the drugs and alcohol that she had far too often found herself engaged in. Her looseness when she partied found her frequently in the beds of guys she barely knew and had left her feeling cheapened, dirty, and abused. She shed the idea of going away to college like a snake discards its skin in the spring.
The love that she had shared with her brother went back as far as her heart could take her. Irish twins, the two grew up inseparable. When the baby of the family arrived 13 months after S was born, she found herself in the precarious position of peacemaker as her beloved brother and beautiful little sister aged. S was devoted to her brother, loyal to a fault and generally persuaded the squabbles between brother and little sister K to favor T. She couldn’t help it. Her brother was her playmate and champion but there was a deeper issue going on. She was wonton of approval from her mother who frequently compared her to her sister- who was prettier, smarter, capable, and confident. Granted, S was pretty and smart in her own right, but not in the ways that were important to her mother and every girl longs for the acceptance that only her mother can give: that she is pretty, she is smart, and she is capable.
And now, some twenty odd years later she found these old wounds climaxing. Torn between trying to earn a college degree, recouping the losses of being dumped by what she thought was the love of her life, striving to earn the approval of her mother, and the need to be by her beloved brother’s side, coupled with a lack of transportation had placed her at the mercies of one of Tom’s roommates. She was desperate for a way to balance her teetering world and the 6’8” figure of M and his 1976 white Buick Riviera offered what she needed: conveyance to and from the hospital. It wasn’t like M was a stranger, one of her closest childhood friends was his younger sister and they had grown up not five miles apart from one another. M had been waiting for this opportunity since he had been in third grade and he saw S walk out of the idyllic elementary school in a navy blue dress trimmed with white rickrack and wearing a bow tie topknot in her fine strawberry blonde hair. She was in kindergarten.
He had tried throughout the years to gain her attention, but the elusive S always turned him down. It almost grew to an unhealthy obsession where the lanky M would devise ways to be with her, to ask her out on a date, excuses just to talk to her, even rooming with her brother in college. His persistence paid off because now more than ever, she really did need him, even if it was only for his car.
He was an aloof guy, a bit odd, terrible at math, and a good basketball player. So good in fact he had two hefty scholarships waiting for his acceptance on his bed at home, along with his collection of Sports Illustrated, Playboys and Swimsuit editions. So far, the scholarship from the University of Utah was the most appealing of the two offered, but if he accepted it then he would be admitting defeat in winning the heart of the girl that he loved: more than the St. Louis Cardinals, more than college basketball, more than his dream of striking it rich in the city. He never felt like he belonged in this rural town. He was terrible at farming; his fingers were too large to pull weeds effectively from the rows of soybeans and corn. He hated farming with a passion and he was going to do everything in his power to escape the only career choice that this town offered. Basketball for now was his ticket out.
Then T had his accident. It is often through tragedy that relationships are forged in the fires of life. Suddenly, M’s plans of basketball and making it in the city waned in the dawn of blooming love in the wake of this tragedy. He had faithfully picked S up to make the two-hour drive to the nearest major hospital for the past several weeks, making sure that his Buick was fueled and cleaned out each time.
Slowly this awkward, overly tall, aloof guy named M was wearing down S’s guard. She had put a wall up around herself, learned through her break-up with N and her terrible experiences at University of Missouri last year. And in the days, weeks and months that followed T’s extensive hospital stay, M was there, available to take her to the hospital and more than just a little willing, even if he knew that he was the rebound guy.
What started out as a simple need on her part soon grew to complexity. Her need to get to the hospital was great and S’s inability to say no, and intense desire to please others found her in the peculiar position of not being able to turn M- the lifeline to her brother- down. While he had been obsessed with her since the third grade, she barely even thought of him. He wasn’t her type and his oddness set her on edge. But slowly, her guard was wearing down and her ability to resist him lessened. She still wasn’t sure about him, but she did see past his façade. And it made her feel good to know that he genuinely wanted to be around her; something she had never experienced before, not even from N.
It wasn’t long before M made his first move towards her and asked her if she would go out on a date. She knew it would be rude to turn him down, with everything that he had done for her and her brother, so she accepted- against her better judgment. Between the long trips to the hospital and then back home to the sleepy all-American town, they began to grow closer and their dating relationship began to take on a life of its own. S wasn’t sure about how she felt about him, but she just couldn’t tell him no. Not now, not when her brother needed her so desperately.
And then it happened. In one nano-second the fate of her future was sealed. They had stopped in a local bar and had one too many cold ones. M struggled with getting control of his drinking in front of her that night. Usually he was pretty good at hiding the fact that he loved his alcohol in front of her. But that night, while looking across at her silver dollar-sized blue eyes, he had lost his ability to control his impulses. And so had she.
She knew what he wanted the moment they were back in his white Buick, but the alcohol hadn’t fully set in. She still had the ability to refuse his advances and for the moment, he listened. Relief spread over her. She really didn’t desire this, not now, not with her brother in the hospital and so much that was uncertain in her future. She was certain of one thing and one thing only: T’s recovery was the most important thing in her life and all else- her feelings for M, college, and where to find a job- all paled in comparison to the devotion and loyalty she felt for him. She had no interest in a romantic relationship, not like the kind that M had made known he wanted. She had only agreed to drink because she was trying to drown the pain she felt in her heart. But alcohol seldom drowns the pain in one’s heart, in fact, sometimes it only highlights it and makes its victim a prey to lack of impulse control, often causing them to do things they would never dream of doing when sober.
Once back at her parent’s farmhouse, S wished that she could just slide off of the red velour seat and slink into her house without having to deal with the advances of M. But that didn’t happen. She was drunk and she knew that she wouldn’t be able to resist him and her weakness for Old Spice aftershave. M walked her to the front door and knew that no one was home; everyone else was still at the hospital. And in the instant he bent over to steal a kiss, the fate of both of their futures was sealed.
She had been feeling unbearably nauseous for the last month. Her propensity towards denial shoved the thought of pregnancy into the far corners of her mind as the holidays approached. T was home now, and things were beginning to get back to normal. He was still receiving a lot of physical therapy and rehab, both in home and out of it. Maybe she was feeling tired and sick from the lack of sleep in the last few months. Or maybe it was depression from seeing the once agile and athletic brother now confined to a wheelchair and the use of a catheter. Whichever it was, she shrugged the tiredness and nausea off as inconsequential and trudged on with her waitressing job at the Walnut Grove Inn. She had only been working here for the last two months. She had applied for the job the day the doctor gave the green light that T was headed home. She was hired the same day.
In a town as small as the one she was raised in, appearances were everything. Her mother never placed much stalk in worrying about who the latest gossip was about and cared even less what others thought of her. But that was where she and her mother differed a great deal. S was consumed with what others thought of her. And her frequent trips to the bathroom, spent hunched over vomiting up what little she had managed to eat before arriving at the Walnut Grove to complete her shift were cause for curiosity among the locals that frequented the place. Sick with worry, literally, she knew that she had to find out for certain. Deep down, she knew. But denial plays funny tricks on the human mind and she was clawing at the hope that maybe- just maybe- she wasn’t.
She used her lunch break to call her best friend NJ and confide in her that she needed a pregnancy test she could take on her own. Pregnancy tests hadn’t been around that long, and they weren’t overly accurate, but S didn’t care. She had to know, but she was too ashamed to show up at Roger’s Pharmacy and purchase a test for herself. NJ worked there, so it wouldn’t be any trouble for NJ to pick one up for her. NJ drove across town and dropped the test off within an hour.
And there she was, hunched up on the bathroom floor, hugging her knees to her chest like a scared little girl. The test on the porcelain sink, proved her wrong. It lay there quietly, like the unavoidable awkward silence that you just can’t ignore. Her entire future changed in that tiny nano-second that it took to conceive her firstborn child.
S wasn’t sure if it was the realization that she was pregnant or the vapors from the fried onion rings coming from under the bathroom door. It didn’t really matter. She rose onto her knees and puked in the toilet. She felt minimally better, and she knew that it would be just a matter of an hour or two before she would be back, rendering the contents of her stomach to the toilet bowl. For now, she knew that she had a job to do. She washed her face, gargled some water and went back out to take care of her orders.
When she finally got up the nerve to tell M about the news that she had been hiding, it was another two weeks later. Secretly she hoped she would miscarry the child not because she didn’t want it, but because she knew that the pressure would be extensive to have to marry the child’s father. That wasn’t at all what she wanted, their hook-up was meant to be nothing more than a one-time event never to happen again. She knew that the pressure wouldn’t come from her family as heavily as it would from M’s. His family had standards, morals, and a code of honor that they fought to maintain. And his mom was paranoid of what people thought of her and her family to the extent that S’s mom didn’t care.
She told him in no well-planned way, nothing special. She just blurted it out over one of their drives over the gravel and dirt roads of the country. It wasn’t what he wanted to hear and she knew it. Nonetheless, it had to be told. And then their parents would have to be informed. Keeping the baby was never a matter of question, just the aspect of whether or not the foolish young couple would marry.
M was a mixture of feelings of anger, resentment, worry and a tinge of excitement. He was going to be a father and all that that entails. He had recently taken a job at a local battery plant because of his love for S. He wanted to marry her, just not have kids. He had no idea how on earth he was going to provide for a family; all he knew was that he wasn’t ready, he wasn’t prepared, and he didn’t want to think about the burgeoning responsibility of caring for a baby.
Their parents found out the next week and with the realization that the news would be all over town, the nature of such thrusting these two prominent families together, the pressure was on M and S to wed. Too tired to resist, and with no other better options in sight, S caved under the pressure. A shotgun wedding for the day after Christmas was planned with no one but siblings and grandparents in attendance to witness the marriage of M and S.
