14

I was now working for the law firm so much that we decided to get someone to help me with Donald. When I went to call the family friend who we heard was looking for babysitting work, the phone seemed heavier than usual. When she answered, I strained to sound upbeat about this turn of events.

The truth was that I was delighting in Donald’s childhood, more than I could have imagined I would. I never had yearnings to be a mother when I was younger, and until I met Joe I figured that I might not have kids at all. Even when I was pregnant with Donald, I worried that I wouldn’t be able to connect with him because I was missing whatever gene makes women maternal. Now that he was here, though, I found myself surprised anew every day at how much I enjoyed being a mother. It was a wonder to watch his little face come alive as he discovered new things about the world. I was fascinated by how he used his limited vocabulary to express his ideas, like the time he pointed to the crescent moon and turned to me with great concern to ask, “Moon? Broken?”

As I talked to our friend, a fifty-year-old lady named Irma, I thought of what Joe would say about my hesitation. He’d remind me to keep my eyes on the goal. He’d tell me that these are the kind of sacrifices you have to make to have a successful business. He was right. I shooed away that sense of sadness, and booked Irma for four days a week.

On her first day of work, Donald warmed to her immediately. He ran over to show her his “twactor” toy, and she scooped him up in her arms. She spoke to him in Spanish, and he listened as if he understood every word. It was as if he could sense the decades of history that her family shared with ours. Irma’s sisters had arrived in this part of Texas thirty years earlier, and my dad’s parents were among the first people they’d met. My grandparents spoke fluent Spanish from the years they’d spent living in Mexico, and they helped her sisters get on their feet in their new country. Our families had been close ever since.

My mom came in from her office, and she and Irma hugged. They exchanged pleasantries despite my mom’s limited Spanish and Irma’s limited English, and I excused myself while they talked.

I sat down at my desk in my bedroom office. I was planning to take time for some mindless web surfing, but an email marked urgent caught my attention. It was from Joe, and its subject said Call me as soon as you get this. Our search engine rankings had plummeted, Joe wrote, and he and the employees were in a panic. “We’ve had no new leads in the past ten days,” he reported in another email. “Before our rankings dropped, we used to get over a dozen people contacting us every week. I need you to fix this now.”

I’d configured the Fulwiler Law website so that it was one of the first results when people searched for terms like lawyer in Austin. The results were better than we could have dreamed: The day we reached the number-two spot on page one of the rankings, the electronic sound of the office phone ringing was like background music that played all day. Queries from potential clients popped up in Joe’s paralegal’s email inbox one after another. Doing well in search engine results generated tenfold more qualified leads than even the most expensive traditional advertising campaigns. Best of all, it was free.

The downside to all of this was that we’d come to live and die by our search engine rankings. We’d cut the thousands of dollars per month that lawyers traditionally spend on advertising from the budget, and had hired another employee with the money saved. Now we’d lost our page-one position and all the revenue that came with it, and I didn’t know why.

The phone rang. “How long do you think it’ll take to fix this?” Joe said, the sound of his keyboard clicking in the background.

“Once I make the changes, we could see results in as early as a few days,” I said. “But the problem is that I don’t know what changes to make. I looked at—”

“Okay, just do what you can, as fast as you can. I gotta go.” Before hanging up he said loveyoubye as if it were one word. Our end-of-call terms of endearment had been getting shorter and shorter lately, down from “I love you, sweetie! I hope you had a good rest of the day” to this loveyoubye thing.

The sounds of Donald and Irma’s intermingled laughter floated in from the living room, but I blocked it out to focus on this task. I typed frantically, opening multiple pages at once, making changes to the website code then checking it against ranking tools. The tweaks seemed to help slightly, but I suspected that they wouldn’t take us back to where we needed to be. Something big must have happened for us to fall so far.

When four o’clock rolled around, I picked up the phone to tell Joe that I’d had no luck. Just before I dialed I stumbled across a news story, released only hours before, that announced a fundamental change to the algorithm of one of the big search engines. I set the phone down. This must be it. It had to be. I leaned forward and read the article, taking time to absorb every word. This was the answer. I needed to do more research in order to know exactly what changes to make, but once I made them, we could probably get the phones ringing again by the end of the week.

I dashed out a search to get the details of the new algorithm. Instead of the list of search results I expected to see, my browser hung on the page with the news story. I clicked around, trying to resubmit the search, but nothing happened. I tried again, and this time an error page thudded onto the screen. My internet connection was down.

A line from one of Joe’s emails came to mind: “Every day that our rank is down, we have to reach into our personal expenses to cover the loss of business.” I clicked again. Same error page.

I called out to my mom, and she confirmed that she couldn’t get online either. I tried one more time, then slammed my fist on my keyboard at the sight of the error notice. What I wished for most—even more than I wished for the problem to be solved—was that my internet cable could feel pain. It would be worth the whole thing having happened if I could give it a good stomping to punish it for doing this to me.

There was nothing to do. I called Joe and left a voicemail letting him know what was happening. Now all I could do was wait.

I tried to busy myself with other things. I reviewed the code I’d saved on my computer, paced the room, tried to check email, became exasperated when I remembered that no internet connection meant no email either, then went back to pacing. Every few minutes I’d return to the same screen and type my query again, slam the Enter key to submit the search—as if maybe it would be afraid to mess with me after witnessing such a display of power—and then shout expletives when I saw the inevitable error page. When I began addressing the computer with direct personal threats, I knew it was time to step away.

I stalked into the hall, giving my computer one last warning glance before I left. Now what? If Donald saw me he’d probably cry for me, and if I picked him up he’d cry harder when I had to go back to work. Then Irma would behold the scene and think about what a terrible mother I was, and twenty years from now Donald would write about it on his tell-all confessional blog called “Memories of an Awful Childhood”. So, clearly, I needed to avoid the living room. The only other options were to go to my room, Donald’s room, my mom’s room, or maybe just keep standing in the hallway. I chose our room.

As soon as I entered, my Bible caught my eye.

I hadn’t been able to walk away from Christianity yet. Despite its issues, there were still too many unresolved questions. How did C. S. Lewis have that uncanny ability to describe the universal moral laws of humanity with such accuracy? How did Augustine of Hippo have such an intimate understanding of the human experience? How did Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Mendel, Kepler, and Boyle—some of the great minds of science, unquestionably rational men—make sense of the logical flaws with Christianity?

And there was the mysterious figure of Jesus himself. Even if I didn’t have clarity on exactly who he was, there was no question that he single-handedly started a religious revolution that was still going on thousands of years later, despite the fact that he was a poor man who was executed. As Joe pointed out when he first saw me reading these Christian books, “No founder of any other major world religion claimed to be God.” Cult leaders throughout the ages had tried to pull it off, and their religions always petered out once they made the very un-godlike move of dying and staying dead. So what did Jesus have going on that allowed his religion to spread like a shockwave through the ancient world despite his grandiose claim, and despite the fact that being a Christian often meant persecution or death?

I continued staring at the Bible. I could not escape the feeling that there was something real that I had yet to find, some treasure buried beneath these words. As if the book had its own gravity field, I felt drawn to it, to pick it up, to read it. But I’d done that dozens of times by this point, and each time I walked away only more confused. I turned to walk out the door, but I couldn’t. I had nowhere else to go.

Okay, God, let’s try this again, I whispered. I took the book in my hands. My heart was full of so many worries and questions that I didn’t even know where to start. Should I pray for a resolution to the search engine issue? Or just ask for help figuring out if God exists? I packed it all up into a ball of hope and yearning, and did that thing where I sent it out in the form of an unspoken prayer that I hoped someone could hear.

I closed my eyes and ran my hand along the faux leather cover. Augustine of Hippo once opened a book of Paul’s letters to a random page and received a profound message from God. Maybe that’s where I’d find the answers I was looking for, too. My fingertips moved blindly over the edges of the pages and worked their way into an opening. I slid my finger down the delicate paper and stopped when it felt right. I opened my eyes to see what message awaited me:

“In the twelfth year of Joram son of Ahab king of Israel, Ahaziah son of Jehoram king of Judah began to reign.”

“Oh, come on!” I snapped the book shut and stood up. Okay, this was it. This religion was obviously making me crazy, Exhibit A being that I was now turning to random pages in the Bible for answers to search engine optimization problems.

I stacked the books on my bedstand: Mere Christianity, Augustine’s Major Writings, The Case for Christ, and the Bible. I wasn’t ready to shove them under the bed or into a box yet, but I was close.

From out in her office, my mom called that the internet connection was back up. I finished the last of the code changes just in time to take Irma home. I strained to make conversation on the drive, my mind awhirl with stresses and questions about everything from the existence of God to how to get the law firm website back on page one of law-related search results. I briefly attempted to tell Irma about the work I’d been doing, but when I said in Spanish that “Our word is low on the computer and now I am anger”, I changed the subject to the weather.