Thank You

    My name is Jacob Proder and I was born with bad timing. My parents lived in a two bedroom house on the outskirts of Chicago. The day I was born my mom had been playing Bingo at the local church as she did every Monday night. It was down to the last game of the night and all she need was B-15 to win the pot for the night which was somewhere around $900 dollars. Her sister Sue had decided to go with her that night since my dad couldn’t. He was a truck driver and had just left for one of his longer trips. He was traveling from Chicago, Illinois to Missoula, Montana with stops in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Rapid City, South Dakota. The trip would take him about two weeks between stops, drop offs, and pick ups but it was extra money that would be needed when I was born.
    So there was my mom, one letter and number combination from winning the night’s jackpot when she felt shooting pains. She had never given birth before so she was just as shocked as those around her when she screamed out, “Jacob Lee, I swear to Jesus!” She had known for weeks what she would name me and whenever I did something unexpected like kick her in her sleep or cause her to pee every half hour, she would scold me. Naturally, Sue grabbed her by the arm and walked her out of the church cafeteria. As she turned the corner she faintly heard Mr. Gibbon announce “B-15.”
    Aunt Sue drove straight to the hospital swearing she would get Mom’s things later. Mom went into contractions two weeks early so she hadn’t packed her bag yet which was fine because, as she would said:
      “All I need is my deodorant and a wash cloth and I’ll make do.”
      She was in labor for 14 hours. So when I finally came out into the world, she was just happy to get me out of her. The doctor said what had caused such a long and painful birth was that while she had been bumping around in the car on the way to the hospital, I had gotten restless and had wrapped my umbilical chord around my neck. The jostling of the car was just right so that I made myself a noose and was cutting off my air supply. 
    I was almost white when I was born so, being two weeks premature and a lack of oxygen, the doctors had to take me to the neonatal wing of the hospital. They did a bunch of things that neither my mom or Aunt Sue remembers, but I am constantly reminded that I almost didn’t live.
    Rather than seeing me as a miracle child, I always thought my mother saw me as a bother. She would always tell people that she was offered a job with Calvin Klein as a seamstress for his men’s line before she found out she was pregnant. He had supposedly seen her work at the boutique she worked at in Chicago and sent his assistant to talk to her. What I later found out was that she had been offered a job working for Calvin Clean, a small sweat shop type factory that sold its garments to Walmart. The names sounded alike so when a friend of hers had mentioned Calvin Klein, she insisted he had tried to employ her.
     When she found out she was pregnant everything changed. She was forced to get a second job and Dad worked extra hours to bring in enough money for them to afford a house. They had been living in a trailer before that and knew the three of us could not live in such a small home. Although they wanted to stay in the city, they settled on a small house in a cozy neighborhood in Wilmette, Illinois. Mom made quick friends with the neighbors who were more than willing to help watch me while Mom, ironically, worked a shift at K-mart or the boutique.
    One neighbor in particular who didn’t mind keeping an eye on me while my mother worked was Ms. Allen. She had a son who was a couple of months younger than me named Joe who I would play with. My mother often returned the favor and would watch Joe on the weekends while Ms. Allen worked a double shift at the local diner. Joe and I became friends from practically living over one another’s houses. Neither of us really had a male role model in our lives, Joe’s dad having left before he was born and mine being out on the road so often, so we kinda were each other’s testosterone builders. We would sometimes help each other with the chores each of our mothers gave us. I would always take the garbage out and then bring the cans in the next morning and he would always wash the dishes.
    One day, when we were eight, I had forgotten to take in the garbage cans. It was unlike me but I had a big spelling test that day and had to study before Joe and I caught the bus. The roads were still slick from a fresh rain only hours before. Joe knew I had to study before we got on the bus so he brought his own garbage can in and crossed the street to get mine.
    “Thanks, Joe!” I yelled from the front porch, looking up from my spelling sheet for a few seconds.
    “No problem,” Joe replied.
    What neither of us knew at the time was that that morning there had been an accident two streets up and cars were being detoured down our road. As I looked back down at my spelling sheet I heard a terrible screech. Looking up I saw Joe sprawled across my lawn unconscious. Mom had already left for the boutique and Ms. Allen had been called in to work for a sick coworker. The driver stumbled out of his car.
    “Diid Iy do thaat?” he slurred. His B.A.C., as we found out later, was .3 and he had been going 20 mph over the speed limit. Mrs. Johnson next door had heard the noise and came outside. She called 911 and when the paramedic came, she said Mrs. Johnson and I could come with Joe in the ambulance. He was very still but I could see his stomach moving up and down.
    “That means he’s breathing which is a good sign,” Mrs. Johnson assured me.
    All I could think about was that my timing had been bad again and this time I might have killed my best friend.
    The good news was that Joe didn’t die. He only had a concussion and a broken leg. They had to keep him in the I.C.U. for a week to monitor his head. He left the hospital 10 days after going into it. What happened next was worse than death in my mind at the time. Because Joe’s hospital bills were so high, he and Ms. Allen had to move in with her parents who lived in Arizona.
    “Don’t worry, Jake,” Mom had said. “He’ll be able to come visit during the summer… Joe, you know you’re always welcome at our home.”
    “Thanks, Donna,” Ms. Allen had said.
    Both Joe and I knew this meant we would never see each other again.
    My childhood after that was kinda a blur. I made more friends but none as close as Joe. We wrote letters to one another for a few years but the letters were spaced out more and more as time went on until they just stopped coming.
    Entering high school I had a handful of friends who I hung out with on a regular basis. I never had a girlfriend because, as my mother had pointed out to me many times before, I had bad timing. I would ask a girl out and she would be getting out of a long relationship or have a “kinda boyfriend.”
I tried not to take it to heart, but I wasn’t one to take rejection well. Then, one day, there was Sarah. I’d like to lie and say she wasn’t like other girls, but I couldn’t find much that separated her from the other girls who walked down the hall except for one small fact: she liked me. She was a fringer on my group of seven friends. She was friends with my friend Ellen and would sometimes hang out with us at the pizzeria or go to the movies with us. She was just one of those people who blended into the background. That was until we took a trip up to Lake Michigan. My friend Ben had a cabin on the shore so one weekend in July he, Ellen, Sarah, our friends Mike and Martin, and I all went up for a fishing trip.
     It was a beautiful weekend so we wasted no time. Ben had a pier that went out far enough for us to just sit and fish from. They all joked it would be best to keep me out of a boat cause I was bound to sink it if I had the chance, referring to the summer before when I lit a bottle rocket from the small boat I was in and the wind caught it just right so that it exploded on the floor of the bow and blew off a chunk of it. Before I could get the ten feet to shore the boat was completely submerged. I would be lying if I said my friends didn’t tease me about such things, but I kinda give them a lot of material.
     While casting the line I managed the catch Sarah’s hair tie in just the right spot that when I yanked my fishing rod out to the lake, I pulled her with it. She didn’t fall in, but it was a close call.
     “Oh, Jake,” she said to me while picking the hook out of her hair. “When are they going to put you in a giant bubble or start taking sharp objects away fro you?”
     “I dunno,” I said, “but for your sake, I hope it’s soon.”
     We laughed for a few seconds and then went back to fishing. She had started telling me a story about how she got the scar on her arm when she felt a tug on her line that almost dragged her into the lake.
     “I think I got something!” she said losing her grip on the pole.
     “Just hold on, I’ll help you,” I said standing up a getting behind her. I grabbed the pole under where her hands were and helped her reel in the two foot trout at the end of her line. Turning around, with our noses almost touching, she giggled.
     “Thanks,” she said.
     “No…problem,” I said bringing myself back from the mesmerizing scent of her hair. It was like a mixture of apples and roses. I knew this because my mom wore a perfume that smelled similar.
We continued to talk throughout the weekend and found we had a lot in common. We both were addicted to Family Guy and where I could start a quote she could finish it. It turns out that our moms both worked at K-mart when we were kids because we both remembered hearing about the woman who brought her ten children into the store and while she was trying on shirts her kids started a water fight in the beverage aisle. That incident went down in that K-mart’s history and I thought it was funny that someone other than I had heard the story in my group of friends.
Sarah and I hung out a lot when we got back to Wilmette. We would ride our bikes to the park, both being too young to drive, and just talk while on the swings. I had finally found someone I could talk to almost as easily as Joe. I could talk to her about anything and she wouldn’t judge me.
     “Your mom really thinks she was offered a job by Calvin Klein?” she asked after I told her the story. “Have you told her the truth?”
     “I don’t have the heart to,” I said. “I figure it’s the one crowning achievement in her life and who am I to take that away?”
     “But you being born was probably an achievement too,” Sarah said.
     “She doesn’t see it that way,” I said. “I’m just the nuisance in her life that’s had bad timing since birth.”
     “Did you ever think that maybe the bad timing started before you?” she asked.
     “What?” I asked. “Are you saying I shouldn’t have been born?”
     “No, not at all,” she said trying to assure me. “All I’m saying is that if she really wanted to pursue that job, she could have. There was something in her that wanted to keep you around and you should look at it that way.”
     Moments after that, I kissed her for the first time. She had made me feel, for the first time in my life, that maybe my life did have purpose and my existence hadn’t been an accident.
      “I know,” she said, “that you couldn’t have had better timing with me.”
      “Yeah, that hook in your hair was a good shot,” I said.
     “Not just that,” Sarah said. “I wasn’t even going to come up to Ben’s cabin that weekend. My best friend had just moved away and I didn’t want to do anything, but when I saw you and the guys outside, packing Ben’s car, something told me to come.”
     “Well, I’m glad you did,” I said and gave her a huge hug.
     That fall Sarah started hanging out with a new group of people. She and Ellen had a falling out and since Ellen was part of the group, the rest of my friends took her side. I had never really told the guys about the friendship I had with Sarah so it didn’t seem right to tell them after she and Ellen had fought.
     We slowly started hanging out less and less. She had band practice and I had just gotten my first job and we started to grow apart. She still smiled and waved when she saw me in the hall, but things weren’t the same. That December, while taking the mail out of the mailbox one day I saw a hug envelope with my name on it. Before even making it into the house I opened the top and started to read the letter that was inside. It was from Joe, a varsity football player who had just helped his team win the state championship. When they moved to Arizona, his mom had gotten back together with her high school sweetheart and they all moved into a house together. There were some pictures inside of the wedding and Joe’s school picture and some pictures from the holidays.
At the bottom of the envelope was a small card in an envelope with my name on it. It was written in Ms. Allen’s handwriting. It had a four leaf clover on the front of the card and inside was a small message that said “Thank you.”