The phone rang.

I considered not answering it, because it was late, I was tired, and I had just spent an hour on the phone with Donna, listening to her account of what she and Wade did the night before. The caller ID indicated that the call was "out of area", and since that's what it says when my mother calls, I picked up the phone, thinking it was her. It wasn't.

"Is Sara there?" It was Sean!

"This is she," I said. "Sean?"

"Yep, it's me."

"How are you?"

"I'm doin' good. I miss you."

I told him that I missed him, too. We talked about the previous night, how we were feeling about what happened (I told him about all the doubts and fears I had on the way home), and could I come back up, alone, before the fair ended the next weekend. I said I might be able to come up Thursday or Friday, that I had no other plans. Sean seemed pleased. He had told a couple of the guys he worked with about me, and what we did, and got a lot of razzing for it. Sean told them they were jealous, that "no fine woman like Sara" would have anything to do with them.

As much as I wanted to talk to Sean as long as I could, I was falling asleep. I told Sean and he said he'd call my cell phone the following day when he got a chance. I said I'd look forward to hearing from him, then he told me,

"Sleep well, fair Saralinda..."

"You too..."

I then hung up the phone and lay back down on the hideabed. I fell asleep and had dreams of seeing Sean again.

The next day was filled with errands, car tune-ups, phone calls to prospective employers, and taking the cat to the vet. Around five that afternoon, while I was waiting for my car to be serviced, my cell phone rang. The display showed a number with a 207 area code, and I knew that it was from Sean. That was the area code for Maine.

"Hello?"

"Hi, Sara, know who this is?"

"Hmm, could it be that sweet carnie from the fair I met on Sunday?"

Sean laughed, "Could be."

Sean only had a couple of minutes to talk, but he wanted to tell me that he we was getting paid on Wednesday, and when I came back up, we'd be able to do more.

"Hell, we might even see Stephen King, who knows?"

The writer Stephen King made his home in Bangor. He and his wife, Tabitha, had just made a generous donation to the Bangor Area Homeless Shelter, for a wing to assist homeless families. Sean had stayed in the shelter when he first came to Bangor, for about a month. He was still there when he heard about the carnival. Since Sean had worked for carnivals off and on since his early twenties, he was very interested in any job that got him out of the shelter, so he signed on. This was about a week before we met.

Sean said he had to hang up, as there was a line for the pay phone. I said that I looked

forward to seeing him on Friday sometime, and he hung up.

When my car was ready, I went to pick up the cat at the vet, then drove home. I didn't know where this thing with Sean was going, but it might be a fun trip.

That evening, I went out to dinner with friends from my former job. We had all been laid off at the beginning of July when our plant was sold. They were having just as much trouble finding work as I was, so I didn't feel so much like a failure. Several of the ladies I was with were considering leaving the Merrimack Valley to find jobs in Connecticut or Pennsylvania.

I had come specifically to the Merrimack Valley in 1997 to take the job at Lucent. I had been recruited while I was still living in Norfolk, Virginia, during the spring that year. My husband had been recruited by the same company, and had left Norfolk a few months earlier, leaving me with the three kids. Our daughter, Linda, was thirteen, and our sons, Tommy and Mark, were six and three. The offer was too good to pass up, so when school was out in May, the four of us headed to Massachusetts to join David.

I settled into the new routine, and the kids into new schools. Life in New England was far different than in Virginia. For one thing, David and I fought constantly. We'd always had our disagreements, but now they were over stupid things that David had deemed more important than anything. David had also become quite selfish, putting his needs before those of his family. If it was good for David, everything and everyone else could go to hell on a sled.

I managed to keep a lid on my emotions for a while, for the sake of the kids, but that became impossible when David decided to pick a fight with our daughter, who had just turned fourteen. She had been invited to the movies by some of her friends, and her father was adamant that he be allowed to "chaperone", even though the college age sister of one of the friends was already coming along to do just that.

I had noticed David's behavior becoming more and more bizarre as time went on. We had agreed just the year before that when Linda was getting to be old enough to date, that we had to meet any young man who wished to take her out. Group outings were to have an adult chaperone (but not necessarily a parent. A college age sibling would be fine). David, I noticed, wanted to live vicariously through Linda, something that Linda found creepy. David grilled her on a daily basis about life at school, about her friends, even about her periods. She'd even caught her father in her room, pawing through her clothing, on more than one occasion.

So now, when it came time for Linda to go out with her friends, David insisted on coming along. Linda wanted to get away from her dad's weird behavior, not put it on display. When he said he was going with her, Linda said she'd rather not go. David's answer to that was to slap the girl so hard she passed out. His wedding ring left a small scratch on her cheek. He didn't realize it, but the boys had seen what happened, and began to freak out.

That was it! I was done. I ordered David out of the house after giving him thirty minutes to get his things together. When he asked me where he would go once I kicked him out, I told him I didn't care, as long as he stayed away from me and the kids and got help for his problems. Within about four hours, I had a restraining order issued, all the kids checked by doctors, and filed for divorce.

David eventually got help for his "problem", which was identified by a psychiatrist as Gender Identity Disorder. In other words, David had decided that after nearly forty years as a man, he wanted to be a woman, and had always felt like a female inside. This was something I kept from the boys, because of their ages, but Linda had figured it out long before I did.

Our divorce was finalized in August of 1999. David and I remained friends, and it was because of him that I got introduced to karaoke in 2000. It was a great outlet for my "inner diva", and with Linda old enough to watch her younger brothers a couple times a month, it was great for my social life. Dating, of course, followed.

It was in the spring of 2000 that the first rumors were going around the Lucent campus in North Andover that layoffs were "imminent". The rumors were even reported in the local paper, the Eagle-Tribune, quoting so-called "unnamed sources". It was these articles that our union meetings were about for the better part of two years, the union (the Communication Workers of America) demanding that Lucent be straight with us about the status of our jobs. We were told time and again that our jobs were not going to be affected. For union solidarity, Thursdays at our plant had always been "red shirt" days, and that continued.

The first layoffs took place in February of 2001. Five hundred people were let go. I was not one of them, as my section was involved with a project that was expected to last at least through the summer of 2003. Still, I didn't want to be stuck here without a job, three kids to raise (and Linda being recruited by colleges because of her grades and her athletic abilities), and rent to pay. I started to make contingency plans, putting away money so that I could pay my bills and have a place to live. That seemed to work, and life went on as normal. Linda graduated from high school in 2001, as a junior, and would be attending Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, a school she chose despite schools like Harvard and Yale actively seeking her to attend their campuses. Linda played basketball, and O.D.U. had an excellent women's basketball program.

During the summer, as Linda was preparing to leave for college (a prospect her brothers, now ten and seven, didn't like very much), we received the most credible threat to our future at Lucent. The plant was rumored to be on the market, and the new owners would decide whether to keep everyone who was still there, or lay everyone off. Since the plant had not been sold at that point, many people were looking for work elsewhere in the area. I made the hardest decision of my life: to send the boys to my mother in Oklahoma, in anticipation of transferring to the Lucent plant in Oklahoma City.

I had put in the transfer based on information I'd received from my union. The OKC plant was looking for people with my skills, and since I had family in the area, I thought it would be perfect. I explained this to the boys, and they thought it would be great to stay with Grandma for a while and be near their cousins, knowing I would be following as soon as I could get business here taken care of. They would go to school there and everything. They left in early August, already enrolled in the local elementary school. I would follow the next month.

September 11th put a monkey wrench in those plans. Then the OKC plant was unexpectedly sold and my job transfer plans fell though. I had put in my thirty day notice with my landlord, and he had rented my apartment sight unseen to another tenant when I found out I wouldn't be leaving. He was nice enough to put me into a smaller apartment in the same building, until I could make plans to join my boys in Oklahoma.

Since I still had my job in North Andover, and since the school term in Oklahoma City had already started, I decided that I would stay in Massachusetts until I either got laid off, or the school year ended, which ever happened first. I went to Oklahoma for Christmas, put in a few applications at local companies similar to Lucent, then returned to Massachusetts after the New Year. I hoped one of the Oklahoma companies would hire me, so I could leave Lucent before they laid me off, but by my birthday in March, I'd heard nothing.

In May, there was a headline in the Eagle-Tribune: LUCENT TO LAY OFF 950 BY SUMMER. The article stated that the plant was in the process of transferring to a new owner, and they were not planning on keeping the nearly fifteen hundred employees that had not been laid off as of that point. Rumors quickly flew about that my section, which had a contract through Lucent until 2003, would be among those employees whose jobs were in danger of elimination. The ax finally fell on July second, and I was out of a job. My union was no help. I was very discouraged. If I didn't get enough money from severance pay, I couldn't afford to move to Oklahoma until I did. I didn't want to ask my family to help me.

My severance pay was a joke. I applied for unemployment and fortunately was approved. All I wanted to do was find a short term job to last me until the end of the year.

I came home later, and there was a message on my machine. Donna had called three times, asking me to call her as soon as I got in. I dialed Donna's number, and she answered. She had been trying to get a hold of Wade and he wasn't available to take her calls on his cell phone. She worried that he was mad at her, that he might want to break up. I told her there was a logical explanation for why he was unavailable, but Donna wanted to go up to Bangor right then and there.

I reminded her that we couldn't get onto the fairgrounds without a badge, and that we should wait until morning. Maybe Wade would call by that time and she could stop worrying. She agreed, and told me she would call me in the morning to let me know what happened.

Sure enough, at eight the next morning, Donna called back. There was still no word from Wade. She wanted to get on the road to Bangor within the hour. She decided that she was too stressed to drive, so I agreed to. I told her I'd be at her house in fifteen minutes.

I had to pull myself together and get my butt on the road. I stopped by Dunkin's to get coffee, then went on to Donna's.

Donna, needless to say, was a wreck. She got in the car and she kept asking me why Wade didn't call her back in response to all her messages. I kept telling her there must be a reasonable explanation.

"What could be a reasonable explanation, Sara? That he found someone else? That he wants to break up? What, Sara?"

"I think we'll just have to find that out when we get there," I told her. That didn't appease her at all. She fretted and worried the entire three and half-hours it took to drive to Bangor.