Page 45 of Say He's Ready
It was on a Thursday morning, floor plans spread across my kitchen table, that my father called.
“Princess tea.”
I set my pen down. “Hey, Dad. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong.” A pause that said everything. “Your mother had some results come back.”
I sat down slowly. “What kind of results?”
He told me what he knew. Which wasn't much, because Dionna had been managing the information the way she managed everything in her life — quietly, on her own terms, sharing what she thought he could carry and holding the rest herself. What he did know was that the doctors had used a word he kept circling without landing on. I listened to him circle it twice, and then I said it for him.
“It’s okay to say terminal, Dad.”
Silence.
“Is that the word they used?”
“Yes.” His voice came out smaller than I had ever heard it. Franklin LeJune had stood at podiums in front of thousands of people and never once sounded small. “Yes. That’s the word. It’s so damn… final.”
I pressed my hand flat on the table and listened as he told me that she had Ovarian cancer. A silent killer. The one that crept in quiet and by the time anybody noticed it had already made itself at home. A woman like Dionna would have been managing vague symptoms for months, dismissing them, not wanting to make a fuss. By the time she finally went in it was already advanced. That was the particular cruelty of it. The disease had her personality.
“She won't talk to me, Teaghan,” my father said. “I keep trying to discuss the treatment options, and she changes the subject. She’s been making phone calls, planning things, and when I ask about it she says she's handling it.” A pause. “I don't know what to do with that.”
I knew exactly what Dionna was doing. She was living. She was making the most of whatever time she had. She wasn't shutting him out.She was choosing joy with both hands, and he was so busy trying to fix the situation that he couldn’t see what she was doing or why.
“Dad.” I kept my voice even. The same voice I used when I sat across from parents and had to tell them something they weren't prepared to hear. “She doesn’t need another treatment plan right now. She needs joy. She needs her life to feel like her life. She needs you to stop managing what’s happening and be inside it with her.”
Quiet.
“I don’t know how to do that,” he said.
“I know you don’t. But you’re going to learn. Take her somewhere she loves. Not somewhere impressive. Somewhere she loves. Sit outside with her in the morning. Let her talk about whatever she wants to talk about, and don’t solve it. She has been carrying things quietly her whole life.”
He didn't speak for a long moment.
“Don’t you care?” he said finally.
“Daddy, don’t be unfair. Of course I care, but I’m a doctor, and I know that this is happening. Daughter, me is heartbroken, and too close to think about what's best for her. Not us. Her. Daddy, just love her, relax, don’t be so serious.”
“Thank you, princess tea,” he said. “I mean it.”
After we hung up, I sat there for a while. Then I called my mother. She answered on the second ring, bright and immediate, like she had been expecting it. I let her talk about her garden, and something funny my father had done that morning, and a neighbor who had said something that made her laugh. I asked questions and laughed when it was funny, and stayed on the phone until she said she had somewhere to be.
When she hung up, I sat with the phone in my hand and let myself feel the full weight of the now, next, and forever.
Some nights I thought about Malone.
Not Houston. Malone specifically. That boy had taken my hand in a school office before I even knew his father's name. He had eaten my spaghetti and told me it was almost as good as his mother's, meaning it as the highest compliment he knew how to give. He had looked up at me at that fair with those dark eyes that saw everything and said things a nine-year-old shouldn't have the language for yet. I had told him Iwould be his friend even if I couldn't be anything else, and I meant it. Now I was three months removed from his life, and that left me sad and worried. And not because Houston wasn’t a good father. We were separated because Houston was a good father.
And my stance hadn’t changed, I understood, but that didn’t mean Houston hadn’t hurt me.
I didn't let myself go further than that.
The email came on a Wednesday night when I was in bed with my laptop reviewing intake forms for the reopening.
No subject line. Just my name in the preview. I didn’t recognize the address for a second. Then I did. I sat up.
Damn, you blocked me, Sweet Tea. I deserve that, but shit, I don't know…
