Queen Esther & the Second Graders of Doom by Allie Pleiter

Author:Allie Pleiter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steeple Hill
Published: 2006-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Doug sat on the recliner, watching his wife sleep. It was late. The apartment was dark and brittle-feeling. Essie looked like he felt—eyes swollen, hands fisted even in sleep, knees pulled up in a posture of pain.

How had they gotten here?

How had the initial certainty of their move dissolved into this muddle of anger and doubt? How had the joy of Joshua’s birth fallen into this abrasive life of tension and sleeplessness? He was stretched tight from the strain of work and the pressure of knowing their financial future lay on his shoulders alone now. He was weary from continually tamping down the ache to go home and play with his son. His new family needed the overtime pay, they needed his success. He needed his success. Work needed him, home needed him. His parents’ recent e-mail, thick with indignation, had been the last straw. Lord, Doug moaned into the darkness, help me fix this. How do I fix this?

No answer came to him.

Nothing came to him except an overwhelming regret. He spent the next hour just staring at his wife, his son and their frazzled home. Taking in every detail of this dark, desperate hole they were in, completely at a loss for how to dig out. Doug Walker, the man who unraveled technology’s thorniest knots for a living, couldn’t fix this.

He sat there, turning the dilemma over and over in his mind the way he did with a computer bug. In every problem, there was always one small place to start. One equation to tweak, one command to rewrite. That small solution usually led to another equation, then another and then another. It was like carpentry: start with one piece, then attach it to another, then another, and keep going until you had what you needed.

Trouble was, Doug had no idea what he needed.

No, that was wrong. He knew exactly what it was he needed.

His wife.

The look in her eyes when she’d snapped out her regret at coming here, the full scope of not wanting to care and yet caring too much; it had all been there. He knew she’d held it back as long as she could. He knew she’d been thinking it for weeks—he’d been thinking it himself. He knew she was frustrated. Hadn’t he spent the last half hour before she came home wondering how she put up with Josh’s cranky behavior all day long? The pair of phone calls from those boys’ parents had gotten his own dander up, and he didn’t even have anything to do with them. And Essie’s parents—well, there simply weren’t words for them.

Still, she was in the wrong.

Then again, so was he.

How do you win an argument when everyone’s wrong?

You don’t, was the answer that floated to him on the darkness. No one wins. Everyone loses.

So what do I do now, Lord?

Find the one thing you can fix, then fix it. The words of his old college computer prof rung in his ears. But what could he fix?

When Essie shifted position and opened her eyes, he knew.

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