I never did call that semi-regular casual acquaintance and explain. Instead, I got together with Sarah every weekend. Sometimes we went to parties; sometimes we met at her place and stayed there together instead of going out. As far as I knew, she had never broken up with her boyfriend. I was an extra, an anomaly. I never questioned the arrangement or tried to make it more than it was. Those were strange times; I never seemed to have a relationship with anyone that lasted longer than a month or two.
And so it was with this one. In those days restlessness consumed and eventually overwhelmed me no matter what I did. I left town and lost touch with Sarah.
But it didn’t end there.
About a year later I found myself back in Seattle, and I decided to look Sarah up. I didn’t have her personal number, so I called the company where she had used to work.
The secretary who answered informed me that she didn’t work there anymore. She’d moved back to her parents’ home in Idaho.
Why?
She’d got pregnant.
Pregnant?
I managed to wheedle the Idaho phone number from the secretary and gave Sarah a call.
Yes, she said. She’d realized she was pregnant soon after I left. She had decided to move back to her hometown to have the baby so her mother could help her with it. Although she was still ostensibly linked with her old boyfriend, he had commitment issues.
The baby was a girl, and she was already three months old.
“She asked me to take a blood test,” I said.
“She did?”
“Yes. She said that she had asked her boyfriend to take one too. She wanted to know for sure who the physical father was.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I didn’t answer right away. I wanted to think about it. Honestly, I wasn’t worried about the result. I didn’t think there was much chance that I was the father. But there was more to the situation than that. I’d been drifting around – not completely aimlessly, but almost. I knew I wanted to be a writer but I didn’t know how to go about it. I needed some sort of specific direction, something to stabilize me. And… I was lonely. Deeply lonely. If you’ve never been there, you have no idea how it can be on the road. I needed a home. So… During one of our phone conversations, I proposed.”