Sarah Lee left Boston in a hurry. There was a pregnancy, and an abortion, and also an arrest. Not of her, but of him, the boyfriend, the one who had gone sour, a crying shame. The boyfriend from high school, from freshman year to senior year, who had taken her under his denim-jacket-clad arm, the jacket with the cigarette-pack outline worn through the right pocket, a patch of a pot leaf sewn on the shoulder. Under that jacket arm she stayed for four years, as he nurtured and loved her, and didn’t care if she stuttered, and stared down her three older brothers when they were being dicks to her (and they were always being dicks to her), and looked at all her drawings and told her she was brilliant, that’s some great stuff, draw me again, will you, babe? That one, the kind one, with the early stubble, who went on tour one summer with the Dead (Sarah Lee was fiercely and resolutely denied that option by her mother), and when he came back he started buying and selling large quantities of pot, and mushrooms too, so much so that people started calling him “the Ounce” behind his back, until finally there was simply no other choice for the local police but to bust his ass. The pregnancy was two months before the arrest, the abortion one week afterward (Sarah Lee felt nothing for years about it, until she started therapy, and then she cried for a night and pronounced herself “over it”), and the flight to Seattle to stay in the basement apartment of the house of Cousin Nancy, a nurse in a cancer ward, occurred one week after that.
“Here’s what you’re going to do,” her mother had said to her. “You’re going to enroll in community college. I’ve checked already, you can still sign up through the end of the month. Take art classes or whatever you want, I really don’t care, Miss Sarah. Just get involved in something. Idle minds, miss. Idle minds. Also you’re going to stop smoking. And you’re going to cut your hair. Don’t dye it again. It looks atrocious. And you’re going to stop wearing those goddamn jeans. You can’t even take them with you. In fact, take them off right now.”
Sarah Lee stared up at her mother standing there, tidy and pressed and twitching in their kitchen. She didn’t know what her mother was going to do next. There had been a flurry of commands in recent weeks; her mother was in emergency mode. Sarah had been letting her run her mouth and waiting to see what stuck. It’s funny what sticks.
“This instant, Sarah,” she said.
Sarah stood, unbuttoned, unzipped, bent, one leg, then the other. She handed the jeans to her mother. There were holes in the knees. Sarah had drawn a picture of her boyfriend on the back pocket in magic marker. Her mother clenched the jeans, looked as if she were going to rip them in two. Sarah sat back in the chair in her underpants. The plastic cover of the chair felt clammy against her legs.
There was more after that. No contact of any kind with the boyfriend. College applications. And even though she doesn’t like church, she’s going to church from now on. Every weekend. Plus a job, any job. A new attitude. Get your act together. Pronto.