Last Dance, Last Chance

in to help. Her father managed to visit Sarah and David every month or two for the next few years until the children became accustomed to his being gone. They always kept in close touch by phone.
    Sarah did well in school, although her report cards sometimes noted that she was more interested in her social life than in studying. In the fifth grade, she took violin lessons, and she practiced faithfully all through high school, playing in the school orchestra at Springville-Griffith Institute. She had lots of friends, but she always had time for her brother, David, who was now in a wheelchair.
    During her senior year at Springville-Griffith, Sarah was thrilled to be selected as a cheerleader for the basketball team. There were a lot of boys who would have loved to date Sarah, but she never really looked at any of them after she started dating Dan. He was a junior and she was a freshman when they began to go steady. Sometimes high school romances do last, and Sarah and Dan’s relationship was like that. Although they had occasional short arguments, they went to every prom and every football game together. They were as welcome in each other’s homes as they were in their own. They took Sarah’s brother to the movies with them, and the three of them often sat around talking about music. David was a special part of their lives. Sarah wouldn’t have fallen in love with anyone who wouldn’t feel compassion and responsibility for her brother.
    “It was harder for Sarah growing up because her brother was sick,” Barb Grafton said, “but it made her a more compassionate and responsible adult.”
    Dan was one of Tim and Sandy Smith’s four children—Laura, Dan, Paula, and Matthew. When the Smiths moved away from Springville, it meant a 45-minute drive for Dan to see Sarah.
    “People were always predicting that we wouldn’t last,” Dan recalled. “They said when we lived that far apart, we’d break up pretty soon. But we kept dating. When I went off to college, they said we’d drift apart, but we kept dating. They didn’t understand that nothing was going to break us up. We kept beating the odds. I called her my ‘All American Country Girl,’” Dan said, “because Springville was mostly dairy farms, and Sarah just looked like a pretty, kind of old-fashioned girl.”
    Sarah’s brother David went to Edinboro University in Pennsylvania, but he didn’t live to see his graduation. His health failed, and he died on February 12, 1990.
    It was a sad spring, but Dan and Sarah were married on June 12. They got a little apartment in Lancaster, New York, halfway between Barb Grafton and Tim and Sandy Smith. When their first baby, a boy they named Nathan, was born, they started talking about the day when they could buy their own house.
    Nathan bonded strongly with his mother. “He bonded to me, too,” Dan remembered. “But there was something special between him and Sarah.”
    Every year that they were together, Dan and Sarah celebrated that fact. “We still felt as though we were beating the odds when we saw how many couples we knew were breaking up. We toasted each other every year. We were soul mates, and we knew it.”
    Sarah was the optimist of the pair, and Dan admitted that he tended to look at the negative side of things. “She gradually taught me to look on the bright side—she was always positive.”
    Dan was very tall, broad-shouldered and handsome, and strangers might have found Sarah a little docile at first because she was quiet. “But she was feisty,” her mother-in-law, Sandy, recalled, “and she was very strong emotionally. They decided what they wanted out of life together.”
    Dan worked as a drafter/designer, and Sarah began work as a courier for a law firm. She had always been fascinated by the law and hoped to be a paralegal one day. Both Sarah and Dan worked full time, and he had his own business that he’d started in college: custom crating for companies that wanted to be sure their products, mostly heavy machinery, arrived in good shape.
    “We called it ‘DSS’ for Dan and Sarah Smith,” Dan said.
    By August 1995 they had saved enough for a down payment on their first home. Sarah did most of the leg-work on the legal documents they needed, and it saved them some money. It was a “starter” house in Depew, New York, another hamlet near Buffalo, close to Williamsville, where Debbie Pignataro grew up, and near the Buffalo-Niagara International Airport. It had three small bedrooms