The Redemption of Sarah Cain Read Free Page B

cup of coffee. Spying a small table near the window, she snatched it up by placing her briefcase on the booth seat.
    A waitress came quickly. ‘‘Cream or sugar?’’
    ‘‘Neither, thanks. I like my coffee black and hideous.’’
    The petite waitress cocked her head. ‘‘Have it your way.’’
    Sarah smiled to herself. She’d had it her way for quite some time now. Actually, much longer than that. The period of the placid years, the teaching years prior to coming to Oregon, had been some of the best of her life. After the tragic playground incident, though, everything changed. Life’s pulse ceased to beat. Life’s color turned ashen gray.
    Abruptly, she’d terminated her teaching career to appease a small-town uprising, overzealous types who preferred stonethrowing to articulating reason. All this in her own close-knit hometown.
    Sarah took a sip of her hot bitter coffee and opened her briefcase, reviewing the day’s schedule. She would not allow random thoughts of the past to derail her. Not today.
    The waitress circled the tables again. ‘‘Is there anything else I can get for you?’’
    Sarah assumed the young woman was anxious to finish out her bill.
    ‘‘Coffee’s all I need,’’ she said, noticing the hint of relief and scrutiny all mixed together on the woman’s face.
    She’s glad I’ll be on my way , she thought.
    Sarah recognized the all-too-familiar look and recalled an earlier time and place. A moment of lasting pain. . . .
    ‘‘I’m going to have a dozen babies,’’ Ivy had coyly boasted at age eighteen, just six months before she was to be married to her high-school sweetheart.
    ‘‘Better wait and see what your husband says about that,’’ young Sarah retorted. ‘‘ If he shows up for the wedding!’’
    Ivy ignored her comment and gave her an inquisitive, yet sarcastic look. ‘‘How many children do you want?’’
    At age twelve, Sarah had never considered such a thought. She had secretly wondered which boy in the seventh grade she might end up marrying someday. There was one very handsome redheaded fellow three desks from hers in science class. . . .
    ‘‘Never mind,’’ Ivy shot back, irritated. ‘‘There’s no way to have a reasonable discussion with you. You’re too into yourself, Sarah. Besides, anyone can see you’ll never be the ‘mother hen’ type.’’
    Sarah shrugged off Ivy’s snide remark. Who cared? Her sister couldn’t see inside her. Nobody could!
    Mother, it seemed, never made any attempt to put a stop to their seemingly innate bickering. How clashing the discordant blend between siblings. Any seeds of rapport that might have existed had long since been replaced with strife. Sarah and her sister had been rivals from her earliest recollection. She often thought it was because she’d spoiled Ivy’s only-child status, a position Ivy held for six years before Sarah’s arrival. But the sisters’ conflict had more to do with a tussle of temperaments than their birth order. From her earliest recollections their personalities had never jibed.
    Always in the limelight during high school, Ivy had been voted ‘‘Miss Congeniality’’ her senior year and was commonly seen on the arm of one handsome boy or another. Sarah, on the other hand, had to force a jovial face in public, though everyone said she was ‘‘as pretty as a picture.’’ She much preferred playing classical piano or shopping at the mall with her girlfriends rather than going out with boys. When it came to men—young or old—she was far more reticent than Ivy. Especially at that time in her life, boys and dating made Sarah nervous. Not until her college years did she branch out, feeling more comfortable with the opposite sex. And it was while she was teaching school that she joyously began to ‘‘find her voice,’’ cautiously freed to emerge from her shell, away from the confines Ivy’s shadow had cast on her rather cloistered world.
    A few months into her first semester,