When Pigs and Parrots Fly by Gail Sattler

thinks that watching is going to help give her some ideas of what to do at the senior high level. She was so insistent, I couldn’t say no. But I really don’t want to go. So I was wondering if you two would come, so I could have someone to talk to.”
    Sarah narrowed her eyes and glared at him. “Talk to? You’re not supposed to go to a play and talk through it. You’re supposed to be quiet and watch.”
    Hayden smiled, somewhat diffusing her annoyance. “I think he means before and after. It sounds like Crystal might get lost behind the scenes for a long time. I’ve been out with her a few times, so I know what she’s like. I don’t mind going. We were just going to see a movie, anyway. How about if we go to the movie tomorrow and tonight we can go with Josh and Crystal to the school play?” He waggled his eyebrows. “I know they’re having coffee and free donuts, and some great door prizes to entice people to go. My boss’s daughter is also in the play, and he asked me to go with them. I turned him down because I didn’t want to be a third wheel, but I’m kind of curious about the backdrops. Frank told me that he helped the drama group with the mechanics, and that he did something special for a scene change. If you ask me, it sounds far too complicated for a group like this, but he insists it’s going to work, and he’s piqued my curiosity.”
    Sarah couldn’t think of anything she wanted to do less than watch children of people she didn’t know. But Josh looked so desperate. As to Hayden, she could almost see the gears whirring in his head as she imagined him trying to figure out what his boss had done on the allegedly intricate scene change.
    Besides the garden club, Hayden had told her that he was also a member of a dominoes club. She hadn’t known such a thing existed, and she couldn’t imagine the mental energy it would take to calculate the multiple trajectories, then sacrifice hours to set up little rectangles that were destined to fall down within minutes. She supposed that if watching wooden shapes getting knocked over interested him, he probably saw his boss’s stage setup as having the potential to be a larger version of the same thing.
    Inwardly, she shuddered at the thought, but at the same time, it piqued her curiosity too.
    She honestly didn’t know why it hadn’t worked out between Hayden and Crystal. Maybe between the two of them, it was simply too much math.
    When she’d been a child, their school plays had no other backgrounds than bad paintings done by the students and taped to the wall. A decade later, the bar had been raised, but she didn’t think that the skill levels or available resources had changed. Not that she wanted to see Hayden’s boss fail, but now she wanted to see the difference a decade had made in the technical details of a children’s drama production.
    She turned to Josh. “I suppose we can go. I guess you were on your way there right now, weren’t you?”
    He nodded. “Yes. It’s a small parking lot. We’d best go in one car.”
    Following Josh to the car, Sarah reached for the front passenger door out of habit and yanked her hand back. Tonight, she wasn’t really with Josh. Officially, she was with Hayden. And that meant sharing the backseat with him.
    She hadn’t been in the backseat of a car with a member of the male species since high school when her father drove her and her boyfriend to the prom.
    How long ago those days had been.
    Yet, she was still single when most of her friends were either married or about to be married.
    As soon as both back doors closed, Crystal turned around and smiled brightly at both her and Hayden. “I’m so glad all of you decided to come. To make it up to everyone, I want to take all three of you out for dinner tomorrow night.”
    Hayden smiled politely. “That’s okay. Sarah and