Paige looked up at him. “Five months? Yeah, that’s enough time.”
“How about the second weekend?”
“That sounds perfect,” she said and grinned.
With the date set, plans started to get underway. Before Brendan knew it, it was the beginning of April. They’d been so busy getting ready for the wedding that time had flown by. They’d started spending a lot of time over at Paige’s parents’ house, eating most dinners there and using it as the home base for all the wedding planning. On some nights, Lula Mae, Oliver, and Grace would come over with dinner and they’d help out too.
Whenever Brendan had been dismissed from whatever planning he’d needed to be a part of that day, he would hang out with Trevor, watching a hockey game and then baseball when the season started.
The last Saturday in April, the guys threw Brendan a bachelor party. Brendan spent the day out on the water deep-sea fishing with Oliver, Trevor, Jax, Shep, Bennett, Shep’s father Nathanial Sr., Shep’s little brother Finn, Shep and Finn’s uncle Jacob Meadow’s, all of the guys who played on the Stingrays, and all of the guys from the shop. They’d closed King’s Auto for the day.
“I really don’t know how fishing became the logical substitute for a stripper,” Shep said as he popped open a beer.
“I told you I didn’t want that,” Brendan said as he baited his hook. “I have absolutely no interest in seeing any naked woman besides Paige.”
“Oh, hey there, Mr. Morrison,” Shep said, looking over Brendan’s shoulder.
Brendan turned quickly to find no one behind him. Trevor was on the other side of the boat talking to Oliver and Shep’s dad.
“You’re the least funny person I know.” Brendan frowned, turning back to Shep.
“I’ve been telling him that for years,” Finn said, shaking his head at his older brother. “But he just never shuts up.”
Finn was a few years younger than Shep. They looked almost identical, same easygoing grin and deep blue eyes. There were a few differences though. Finn was slightly smaller, didn’t have tattoos, and wore his thick, dark hair a little shorter than Shep. Finn had just finished his second year of veterinary school and he was home for the summer.
“So how’s school going?” Bennett asked as he cast out his line.
“Long, man,” Finn said, shaking his head. “This summer is my last of freedom. Clinics start next year. What about you? How’s it been since you got back?”
“It’s better,” Bennett said and nodded. “Slowly but surely.”
Bennett had been hanging out with them a lot over the last couple of months, and Brendan had definitely noticed a few changes. Bennett was quick to smile again, much like he had been in high school, and some of the haunted man had left his eyes. He’d become a good friend too, so much so that he was going to be a groomsmen along with Shep and Jax.
“We’ve been keeping him busy,” Jax said, slapping Bennett on the shoulder. “He’s helped out with a few construction projects here and there.”
“What did you guys build?” Finn asked.
They told him about Paige’s art studio.
“And,” Jax continued, “I was looking at this property over on Whiskey River. The house was foreclosed last year. It’s a complete disaster. But Bennett went out and looked at it for me. I made an offer and if all goes well, we’ll start working on it in the fall.”
“Looks like all of you are settling down. So which one of you is going to be the next to get married?”
No one answered. They all just looked at Jax, who frowned and returned his attention to the ocean.
* * *
All in all it was a good trip, except Trevor got seasick. He spent a good portion of the day in the bathroom belowdecks.
“I’m fine,” he told Brendan as they got into his truck. “Really, don’t worry about me, and don’t go telling Paige and Denise. They have enough to worry about with the wedding, and there’s no sense in adding this to the mix.”
“Alright,” Brendan said.
But truth be told, he didn’t really believe it. Something just felt off to Brendan.
A month before the wedding, Paige was spending the day with Denise. They were going to the final fitting on her dress and to run a couple of other errands. Brendan went over to the Morrison’s to watch a Yankee game with Trevor. Brendan had bought a pizza, and Trevor barely even ate one slice.
Halfway through the game Trevor got up to go to the bathroom, and before he made it out of the room he grabbed onto the wall, gasping in pain.
“Trevor?” Brendan said, standing up and going over to him.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he said, waving him off.
Trevor straightened and went to take a step but fell. Brendan lunged, catching him before he hit the ground. Brendan helped him sit on the floor and lean back against the wall. His face was pale and clammy and he was short of breath.
“It’s this new medicine,” Trevor said. “It’s making me sick.”
“Medicine?” Brendan asked.
“I need to see my doctor.”
“Okay, let me call the hospital,” Brendan said, pulling out his phone. “Who am I asking for?”
Trevor just looked at him for a second, something in his eyes that Brendan hadn’t seen before. Pain beyond all reason. “Dr. Kendrick.”
Brendan froze. He just stared at Trevor, unable to move. Dr. Kendrick was the oncologist at the county hospital. He’d been Brendan’s mother’s doctor.
Trevor had cancer.
Brendan leaned back against the wall and slid down, sitting next to Trevor.
He turned and looked at Trevor. “What kind?” he asked, surprised he’d gotten a sound out of his dry throat.
Trevor blinked a couple of times, tears falling down his face.
“Pancreatic.”
“Fuck,” Brendan said, unable to think of anything else to say.
A small bitter laugh escaped Trevor. “My sentiments exactly.”
“Does Denise know?” Brendan asked, leaning his head back against the wall.
“Not yet. I went to the doctor last month because I’d been having back pain and not feeling so great. They ran some tests. It’s too advanced to do anything.”
All of a sudden Brendan was back to the days when his mother had been dying. Her lucid moments had been few and far between. She’d been on a lot of painkillers and she’d go in and out of sleep throughout the day. He still remembered it all so clearly, the grayish tint to her skin, the black circles under her eyes, the croaking voice that came out of her cracked, dry lips. She hadn’t looked like his mom anymore. She’d been wasting away for months to a small, frail woman. She’d always been so full of life, and then she’d just been gone.
On the day she’d died, Brendan had gone to say good-bye to her before he’d left for school and she’d grabbed his hand and held on. She’d been so weak. She’d probably thought she’d been holding on for dear life but, God, she was just so damn weak. That day, she’d held his hand and told him she loved him just like she had every day before he left. But that day? That day, she’d kept repeating herself and she’d made him promise to never forget it, made him promise to never forget her.
He’d known. That whole morning he’d waited for it, waited for the moment that someone was going to knock on his teacher’s door to tell him his mom had died. It was during his fifth-period class, right after lunch. Coach Mathis and Principal Reynolds came. Brendan had never liked Principal Reynolds. He’d always been an arrogant, smarmy prick. He’d been awful to Grace and Brendan when they were in school. He never did anything about the kids that made their lives hell. But that day? That day, Brendan hated him. Grace had been hysterical. She couldn’t stop crying, but some sort of strange calmness had come over Brendan. Like he’d been watching from outside his body, watching himself going through the motions.
They’d sat in Principal Reynolds’s cold, empty office, Grace sniffling beside him, and he’d been staring at a cheesy picture above the
secretary’s desk. It was of a kitten climbing a mountain with the caption NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE underneath it.
Nothing is impossible?
Everything was impossible at that moment. Talking to his mom again, hearing her laugh, asking her for advice, seeing her cheering him on from the bleachers. It was all gone. She was gone and she was never coming back, because if one thing was impossible, it was coming back from the dead.
This wasn’t happening again. There couldn’t possibly be another person in his life who was being ripped away. Brendan didn’t only love Paige. He loved her parents. They were his family too. And this was going to absolutely destroy Paige. It was just another thing that he couldn’t protect her from, and that killed him.
“How long?” Brendan asked, wiping at his face. He wasn’t sure when he’d started crying, but tears were streaming down his face.
“Best case? Six more months.”
“When are you going to tell them?”
“After the wedding.”
Brendan nodded, still looking straight ahead. He knew that he needed to get up and take Trevor to the hospital, but that involved standing up and he had no idea how to do that. The world had been ripped out from underneath him.
Again.
Chapter Nineteen
A Calling, Not a Choice
Brendan was struggling. It was hard for him to watch Paige every day. To see her so happy, when he knew that everything was about to change. It was all just an illusion. But Trevor wanted to wait to tell her and Denise, and Brendan understood that. The wedding was supposed to be this great joyous event, and that wouldn’t be the case if everyone found out that Trevor was dying.
So Brendan bore the weight of it. What other choice did he have? Trevor asked him to do something, so he was going to do it. Brendan would do anything for Paige, no matter the cost. And really, Brendan’s suffering was nothing, nothing compared to Trevor’s.
As it got closer to the big day, things started to get crazier. Brendan did everything he could to lessen the burden on everyone, especially Trevor. Denise and Paige, unaware of what was going on, were asking Trevor to do the type of stuff he’d been able to do before. He was trying very hard to cover up his exhaustion and the pain he was in, only letting it show around Brendan.
Brendan took Trevor to his doctor’s appointments. The new pain medicine was working better and it wasn’t making him sick. It was a little difficult for Brendan to be back in the hospital. At least it didn’t look the same as it had. The wing with the oncology department was being remodeled and the chaos of the construction was a nice distraction so that Brendan didn’t get sucked back in. His mother hadn’t died at the hospital, but she’d spent a lot of time there in her last few months, and Brendan had been with her for most of it. He’d tried to be her rock, and when she’d died he’d fractured into a thousand pieces. But he couldn’t fracture this time, because Paige was going to need him.
“You’re going to have to stop with all of this,” Trevor told him one day when they were driving back from the doctor.
“Stop with what?”
“This funk that you’re in.”
“It’s more than a funk,” Brendan said, shaking his head.
“I’m dying, Brendan. There’s nothing anybody can do to change that. It’s out of our control. But you know what is in our control?”
“What’s that?” Brendan asked.
“How we choose to spend the time that’s left. You’re about to get married to my daughter. It’s a good time. Enjoy it. You can’t fix everything so let it go. Do that for me.”
And so Brendan did.
For now.
* * *
The weekend before the wedding, Abby flew down from DC to help with all of the last-minute wedding preparations. When Brendan and Paige had first gotten serious, Abby had told him that if he ever hurt Paige, she would hurt him. He’d seen Abby in pictures, and he’d talked to her a few times over the phone, but it was more than slightly amusing to meet the pint-size enforcer.
Abby was just over five feet tall, with auburn hair and dark blue eyes. She was ridiculously pale, but her fair skin showed off barely any freckles. It was clear that appearances could be deceiving, because as it turned out Abby was intimidating as hell.
“She scares me,” Shep said the night before the wedding.
The Sleepy Sheep was closed to the public, and Shep’s family was throwing the rehearsal dinner. Lula Mae and Grace, with the help of Pinky, Panky, and Tara, had spent the last three days cooking for the rehearsal dinner and the reception. Which left Brendan, Shep, Jax, and Bennett at Paige, Denise, and Abby’s disposal to do whatever jobs they’d needed done.
“She’s one of the most intimidating women I’ve ever met,” Shep continued, shaking his head as they watched Abby laughing with Paige. “You’d never know she was crazy.”
Abby wasn’t afraid to tell someone when they didn’t do something correctly, and she was more than happy to tell them when they continued to do it wrong. Well, maybe happy wasn’t the right word. There’d been a particularly tricky moment, when Shep and Jax had been stringing the lights, where Brendan had thought that Abby’s head was going to start spinning. But to be fair, neither of them had really listened to her and what she’d wanted. After that, they’d both started to pay strict attention to her details.
“She’s not crazy,” Brendan said, popping the last of his sandwich into his mouth. “She’s just a bit of a perfectionist.”
“Potato, patato. She’s so different from Paige though. It kind of blows my mind that they’re so close.”
It was true that Abby was a little more polished than Paige. Where Paige wore brightly colored clothes, sometimes with patterns that gravitated toward the eye-popping side, Abby tended to side on black or dark, solid colors. Where Paige had no problem throwing her hair into a messy bun, Abby had hers sleeked back into some sort of twist thing. Abby was streamlined, or more simply, she colored inside the lines. Whereas Paige was not an “inside the lines” sort of person, not at all, which was one of the things that Brendan loved most about her.
At that moment, Paige looked over at Brendan, her big gray eyes smiling at him from across the room. She said something to Abby, not taking her eyes off him, and the two of them made their way across the room.
“I’m going to go check on Jax,” Shep said, taking a step back.
“Chicken shit,” Brendan called after him.
“Not denying it,” Shep said before he turned around and headed to the bar where Jax was frowning out at the dance floor. Grace had been talking to one of Paige’s cousins for most of the night, and they were currently dancing in front of the live band.
Before Paige and Abby made it over to Brendan, Denise picked off Abby and pulled her away.
“Where did Shep run off to?” Paige asked, sliding her arms around Brendan’s waist. She was wearing those black wedges that still drove him out of his mind.
“You want the made-up reason or the real reason?” he asked, putting his hands on the small of her back.
“Both.”
“Made up, he went to comfort Jax. Real, he’s scared of Abby.”
“I don’t doubt that being scared of Abby is the real reason he fled. But Jax has been sulking most of the night,” Paige said, glancing over at the bar.
“That’s because Grace is dancing with someone who isn’t him.”
“Jax is a smart man, but when it comes to Grace, he’s an idiot.”
“Yeah, he’ll figure it out one day. Do you want to dance with me?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said and smiled.
He dragged her out onto the dance floor, people moving around them as the beat of the song picked up. After a couple more fast ones the band played one last slow song to wind up the night. Brendan pulled Paige in close and put his mouth to her ear.
“The next time I dance with you, we’ll be married,” he whispered.
“I can’t wait.” She pulled back and smiled at him.
“Do you have to stay at your parents’ tonight?”
He hadn’t spent a night away from Paige since their first night together over seven months ago. Tonight was going to be the longest night of his life for so many reasons.
“Yes,” she said against his mouth, “because I want the first time you see me tomorrow to be when I’m walking down the aisle.”
“That’s,” he said, looking down at his watch and then back up to her, “over fourteen hours from now. Too long, way too long.”
“It’ll be worth the wait.”
“You’re always worth the wait,” he said, pressing his mouth to hers. Like always, the world faded away and all that there was, was Paige. And then she was pulled out of his arms.
“Say good night to your hot mechanic,” Abby said.
The music had stopped and the band was starting to pack up.
How long had they been kissing for? Didn’t matter, it wasn’t nearly long enough. He pulled Paige back into his arms and kissed her again.
“I love you,” he said, pulling back just far enough to look at her.
“I love you too,” she said before Abby dragged her outside.
* * *
Brendan had made only one request when it came to the wedding, that they get married under the oak tree at Ocean Oak Park. The tree had been his mother’s, but it was now Brendan and Paige’s too. They’d had their first kiss in front of that tree, so it was only appropriate that they have their first kiss as man and wife in front of it too. The painting that Paige had painted for Brendan now hung above their bed, so it was yet another thing that he couldn’t look at without thinking of her. But it wasn’t much of a request, as Paige had wanted to get married there too.
It was just before sunset, the breeze coming off the ocean cool. It wasn’t a humid day, which was good, because all of the guys were wearing suits.
“You ready?” Shep asked as he, Jax, and Bennett took their places beside him.
“Without a doubt,” Brendan said as he watched Abby, Grace, and Tara make their way down the aisle, all of them wearing deep blue bridesmaid’s dresses and carrying bouquets of sunflowers.
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