Jonah Sauer

Jonah was born to Kurt and Diana Sauer...and boy, did that not really last long. Jonah is never entirely sure what happened between his parents, but he knows it wasn't good. The way his grandfather tells it, they were just two wildly different people with different personalities. They thought that marriage was going to make them work together, it didn't. They thought that having a kid would bring them together, it didn't. They were two very broken people that just couldn't handle each other, so they made moves to divorce. The problem was that they both now had to decide Jonah. He appreciates that he was a baby at the time, because apparently neither parent actually wanted him – his dad assures him it wasn't a malicious sort of thing, they didn't hate Jonah. They had been young and selfish kids and Jonah had been this tiny baby that constantly cried and needed work; his mom didn't want him because life was too hard for a single mother, his dad said it was even worse for a single father. When they started discussing putting Jonah up for adoption, Jonah's grandfather, Manfred Sauer, finally stepped in and said he would take Jonah in. The catch was that because neither parent wanted responsibility of him, neither of them would have any at all – everything of Jonah's care would be passed over to Manfred, they would have no ability to make choices on Jonah's behalf. It was all going to be Manfred's responsibility. Both of his parents agreed to it and for the most part, Jonah was content. His grandfather was old and caught in his ways, but they got along all right. He did right by Jonah and tried to build him up and understand where he was coming from in things. If Jonah was upset about neither of his parents even wanting to see him, he never showed it.

But then one day, when Jonah was in high school, this stranger showed up on the doorstep, looking all forlorn and maybe a little hopeful. Old Kurt Sauer had finally opted to come see him – apparently, after roughly fourteen years, he had matured and found another woman he loved and had two kids with her. It had gotten him to thinking about the kid he had left behind when he was too young and he had decided to reach out. Jonah's mother never found him again, but really at the end of the day, he couldn't be bothered with someone who obviously didn't want him. He started to form a tentative relationship with his father; it was never going to be an actual father-son relationship. Kurt took Jonah to baseball games, only to find out Jonah hated most sports and had just been trying to appease him. He took Jonah to art galleries or museums and Jonah was bored out of his mind. He tried concerts and amusement parks and arcades. Anything he thought Jonah would like and got confused when Jonah pointed out that he could just ask Jonah what he wanted to do rather than guessing. It steadied after that, though his father was weird about it considering he had no authority in Jonah's life to be a father and Jonah, at that point in his life, had started to discover who he was as a person and didn't need a father anymore. So over the years, the two bonded somewhat, at least enough they had a relationship and his dad even got him a pretty nice graduation present and a letter congratulating him on getting into college. Jonah was perfectly content to start his new life living in the dorms.

The rest of Jonah's story is explored in the To the Moon, Through the Stars story, What Lies Beyond the Stars.

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