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The next morning she woke up with a delicious sense of possibility: she could start a new knitting project. Maybe she'd tackle something more intricate than a scarf this time. Before going into work, she spent an hour online looking through patterns and pictures, trying to find something that inspired her. Pretty soon she realized she was looking almost entirely at men's sweaters.
She and James had been going out for six months. She had never been so in love with a guy before, never felt her body leap to someone's touch the way it did at just the thought of James's hand on her.
It would be wonderful to see him in a sweater she had knit, to watch him walk out into the world wearing something that marked him as hers for everyone to see. If she started it now, she could have it done by Christmas.
Online again late that night, she found a design for an oversize man's cabled sweater in dark red. It was the kind of thing James tended to wear, anyway, only if she made it, she'd buy better yarn than he was used to-like a soft wool with a touch of silk or linen in it. It would be wildly expensive, but she didn't mind spending a lot on his Christmas present.
Later, though, it occurred to her that she probably shouldn't buy the wool in dark red. Another color might be… better.
V
Can you take on a new kid?” Ellen asked Sari first thing Tuesday morning. It wasn't really a question, since Ellen never accepted a refusal.
Sari looked up from the desk she shared on a first-come-first-served basis with several other clinicians. It was early and she was the only one there now, so it was all hers. “How many hours a week are we talking?”
“As many as you can give him.”
“Then there's no way,” Sari said. “I barely have enough time in the day for the workload I’ve got now.”
“Join the club,” Ellen said. “You want to call the parents and tell them you can't make time for their kid?”
“Am I allowed to mention that I work for a crazy zealot?”
Ellen laughed. “Come on, Sari. He's your kind of kid-melt-your-heart-cute with big Bambi eyes. Their first appointment's at ten this morning.”
“That's in less than an hour,” Sari said. “Seriously, Ellen-you said you needed Mary's progress report written up for her IEP this afternoon. I won't have time if I’ve got to-”
“You'll figure something out,” Ellen said. She tossed a file on the table in front of Sari.
“Who did the eval?”
“I did.”
“By yourself?” Sari raised her eyebrows. Ellen never had time to do the whole evaluation. She usually just came in at the end.
“Yes, all by myself. I taught you how to do them, if you remember.”
“You just don't, usually.”
“Well, they were desperate, so I squeezed them in late one night last week.” She pointed her finger at Sari. “You see? You can make more hours in the day, if you try hard enough.”
“We can't all be you,” Sari said.
“Mores the pity,” Ellen said with a wink and left.
And Sari sighed and opened the file, because Ellen-whose voice was too loud and who wore skirts that were too tight over torn black stockings and whose hair was too long and too red for someone over fifty-five-Ellen was her hero and her big sister and her best friend and the bane of her existence all rolled into one overwhelmingly dear package.
Sari had left home to get away from her parents and then somehow ended up working in a place where every woman she met reminded her of her mother. They weren't necessarily as pretty and well preserved as she was, but they all flickered with the same nervous terror.
Like the mother who had come in just the week before. The first thing she'd said when she walked in the door with her son was, “I wouldn't even be bringing him if his teacher hadn't made me. All this fuss and bother, just because he has a slight language delay.”
She smelled of cigarette smoke and Opium perfume and watched Sari's every movement with a ferocious intensity.
Sari tried to talk directly to the boy-a chubby four-year-old with dark rings under his eyes-but he wouldn't look at her, not even when she stuck a bright pink sticker on her nose and danced in front of him.
She put an M &M inside a cup, showed it to him, then covered the cup with a book. “If you take the book off, you can have the M &M,” she said. He sat there, hunched inside himself, and didn't move.
“He's not hungry,” his mother said. “He just ate lunch. He doesn't want the M &M.”
Sari put two cars in front of him and he lined them up next to each other, but when she took one and made vroom vroom noises, he just shoved the other one off the table with the side of his hand and didn't respond when she asked him to pick it up.
“He doesn't like to play with cars,” his mother said. “Everyone thinks boys like cars, but they've never interested him.”
The whole exam went like that. She kept making excuses for him.
When Ellen came in to meet with them at the end of the hour, she glanced through Sari's notes and told the mother that the boy had some clear delays in several key areas, areas that might suggest an Autistic Spectrum Disorder. She said they'd like him to return to the clinic for further evaluation and to arrange for a program of interventions.
The mother exploded. “Oh, for God's sake!” she said. “Look at him. He's sitting there quietly, as normal as you or me. But of course you won't admit that.” She stood up. “Do you ever say a kid is okay? No, of course not-why would you? There's no money for you in okay.”
“This isn't about money,” Ellen said.
The woman dragged her unresisting son by the hand to the door. “It's always about money,” she said over her shoulder and left.
Ellen and Sari looked at each other. “That poor kid,” Ellen said. “That poor kid.”
Sari was used to moms like that. She was used to moms of all types, really-she saw dozens of them at the clinic on any given day. Sometimes both parents came in with the kid, but ninety percent of the time it was just the mother, so it was definitely unusual for Zachary Smith to arrive at the clinic later that morning with only his dad at his side.
Sari rose to greet them, holding her hand out to the little boy, who had dark curly hair and large blue eyes. Ellen was right-Sari did prefer kids who were cute, although it was embarrassing to realize that her boss had noticed.
“Hi,” she said. She had to reach down and take his hand, since he wasn't responding. “You must be Zachary. My name is Sari.” She turned to the father, her hand still extended. “Sari Hill.”
“Jason Smith,” the father said, putting out his own hand in greeting.
The name and the face came together and she realized she knew him.
It was too late, though. She was already shaking his hand.
It hit him at the same moment, ‘“wait,” he said as their hands clasped. “That name. Sari Hill. Why does that sound so familiar?”
“High school,” Sari said. She withdrew her hand. “We went to high school together.”
“Oh, man,” he said with delight. “Of course! That's it! Sari Hill. I totally remember your name from attendance. Wow. What a weird coincidence.”
“Yeah.” She could have passed him a hundred times in the street and not recognized him, but, looking at him now, she thought he hadn't really changed all that much. He had been an athlete in high school, and he still looked fit but not beefy. His hair was still thick, but his face had gotten thi
He was still just as handsome as he had been in the days when girls used to fall over themselves trying to sit near him in English class.
“So,” Sari said. Her voice came out unusually high. She cleared her throat with a little cough. “Excuse me. A lot's changed for you since high school, I guess. Tell me about your little boy.”