She pulled her chair closer, disturbing Romy on the floor in the hall. The dog stood but didn’t enter the room.
“Hey, Dad,” Becca said.
He looked as though he was trying to smile, his lips rising on only one side of his face. The other side was lax, the muscle paralyzed from a minor stroke, the medical emergency that had indirectly led them to the cancer. It was hard for Becca to imagine that had been two years ago. Then, he’d been riding his John Deere, tending his immaculate lawn, hunting, fishing, living the good life of retirement years. Of course, this wasn’t something he’d said to her but rather to Becca’s mother, who had later relayed the information to Becca. It had been her mother who had given Becca’s father the number to the condo’s landline.
“You should talk to him,” her mother had said. She was living in San Francisco with her boyfriend, George, the man she had lived with since divorcing Becca’s father over a decade ago.
“No,” Becca had said in return.
“He’s your father.”
Becca hadn’t responded.
“You need to let go of your anger, Bec. It’s the only way the two of you can ever move on. You need to talk with him and tell him how you feel before it’s too late.”
Becca had imagined her mother smoothing her eyebrows while they talked, a habit she had whenever they discussed a topic she found upsetting, particularly the topic of Becca’s father.
“Why? You never did. You just left.”
“I know, but it was different for me. And he’s your father.”
“I don’t care.”
“Oh, honey, can you hear yourself? It takes so much energy to be angry.”
They’d had the same conversation over and over since they’d first learned Becca’s father had been diagnosed with cancer. Becca supposed the only reason she was here now, the only reason she was sitting next to her father’s bed waiting to hear what he had to say, was because it was what her mother had wanted her to do.
He opened his mouth to talk and started coughing, a phlegm-filled, choking kind of cough. It continued for several seconds, seizing his chest, and she was suddenly alarmed.
“Dad,” she said.
His hand covered his throat. She stood and spun in circles, looking for a call button or a bell. She was a vet; she was used to emergency situations and should have some semblance of what to do, but she didn’t. For a moment her mind went blank. This was why she could never operate on one of her own pets. When it was personal, her emotions muddied her thoughts, rendering her useless. She reached for a tissue from the box on the nightstand, placed it to his lips. It was the only thing she could think to do. He spit the mucus clogging his throat.
The door opened, and Jackie breezed in holding a cup with a bendy straw. She was wearing skinny jeans and a tight-knit sweater with a plunging neckline.
“Here,” Jackie said and put the straw between his lips. “This should help.” She held the cup while he sipped the water. At the same time, she took the wet tissue from Becca’s hand and tossed it in a nearby trash can.
Her father turned his head away when he’d had enough.
“Come on now, just a little more.” Jackie talked to him as though he were a toddler refusing to take his medicine. “You need to keep fluids in you.”
Becca’s father looked at her. She could’ve sworn he rolled his eyes.
When he finished most of the water in the cup, Jackie smiled. “Much better,” she said. “I’ll leave you to your visit.” She closed the door behind her.
“Does that happen often?” Becca asked once they were alone, not knowing what else to say. “Is there anything I can do?” She looked at her feet. So many conflicting feelings piled up inside of her—twisting, writhing, knotting, tangling with the anger at her core. And buried far below all these emotions, there was something else, something that made her heart ache.
He shook his head and tried to pull himself up.
“Let me help you.” She reached under his arm. His bicep was as thick as her wrist. Once she got him comfortable, he looked at her long and hard, the way he used to look at her when she was a child, serious and stern. His eyes reflected a glimpse of the man he’d once been, despite the stroke and the cancer rotting his body. It was the reason he was still alive, his absolute refusal to give in. He’d stuck around a lot longer than the six months the doctors had forecast originally. Jackie might’ve had something to do with it.
Becca’s resentment returned. How easily her feelings spiraled and churned.
He opened his mouth to speak, but another coughing fit started. She reached for more tissues. He tried to talk through it, struggled to get the words out. His shoulders shook violently.
“What can I do?”
He shook his head.
Jackie breezed through the door again with another cup of water. This time she placed it on the bedside table. She rubbed his back and made soothing, cooing sounds as he hacked and spewed mucus into the tissues in Becca’s hand. When it was over, and air was moving more freely through his blackened lungs as best it could, he laid his head back against the pillow. It was enough to drain him of all his strength.
Becca searched Jackie’s worried face.
“Let’s give him a few minutes to rest,” Jackie said and motioned for Becca to follow her out of the room to where Romy was waiting. But before Becca stepped into the hall, she heard her father say, “John.”
She turned back around and stared at him. His eyes were closed, his head tilted to the side. It had been years since she’d heard him say John’s name. Maybe she’d imagined it. She must have. And still she paused before closing the bedroom door behind her.
“Please, sit.” Jackie pulled a chair from the kitchen table, the same kitchen table Becca’s parents had bought when Becca had been in her junior year of high school. It had been the last big purchase her parents had made the year before they’d split. Becca had said to her mother, “You can’t buy furniture together and then just up and leave.”
In her sixteen-year-old mind, buying furniture had meant that her parents had been trying to work it out, because no matter how bad things had gotten, Becca had wanted her parents to stay together. Thinking back, she understood that her reasons may have been based on some primal childhood need for security, even if it had meant them staying together had been pretty messed up.
Jackie held on to the back of the chair, waiting for Becca to sit. Becca found it insulting to be treated like a guest by this woman in the place Becca had once called home.
She sat in the chair, folded her arms. “How long has he been like this?”
“Like this?” Jackie pointed upstairs. “Not long.” She sat in the chair across from Becca. “I’ve talked to hospice. I have someone that will be coming in when I can no longer manage him on my own.” She paused. “I should say if I can no longer manage him on my own.”
Jackie touched her neck, and Becca’s eyes were drawn to Jackie’s ample cleavage. She forced herself to look someplace else, but everything in the room was filled with so many memories, she couldn’t find a safe place to set her gaze. Romy dropped her head in Becca’s lap, and she focused on her furry friend, scratching behind her ears.
“How much longer do you think he has?” she asked.
“Oh, it’s hard to say. Your father is a fighter. It could be another week or two. But my guess is it’ll be sooner.” She sounded like a woman who had accepted what was coming. “Would you like some tea?” She sprung from her chair and put a pot on the stove.
Becca found it charming to have tea brewed the old-fashioned way. More often than not, she’d heat up a cup in the microwave.
Jackie stood by the stove; perhaps the distance made it easier for her to say what she’d planned all along. “I know you and your dad have had your differences.”
“To put it mildly,” Becca said.
Jackie didn’t continue right away but let Becca’s comment settle before she started again. “I don’t know all the details of w
hat went wrong between you two. And honestly, I don’t care. I don’t think it matters. What matters now is that your dad needs you. And maybe I don’t know you well enough to ask this of you, but I’m going to ask anyway. I’m asking because I care about what he wants and needs. And right now, he wants his daughter with him. He needs you here.”
Becca was shaking her head. Who did this woman think she was? She knew nothing about Becca or her relationship with her father. “I have the clinic, appointments, surgeries scheduled . . .” Her voice trailed off. It was a weak excuse. Her colleagues could certainly handle the workload. They were all equipped with the same surgical skills if needed.
But no. She couldn’t stay here with him. Why would she? He had sent her away. And he didn’t deserve her company now. He didn’t deserve her. The only woman he deserved was the tart in front of her, although Becca immediately felt bad for thinking of Jackie in that way. After all, Jackie had stuck by her father all through his illness, and she didn’t have to. She was fifteen years younger than he was. She could’ve packed her bags and walked out on him the second his health had faltered to the point where he could no longer care for himself. And the strange part about it was that Becca might’ve had more respect for her if she had. But of course, Jackie hadn’t. She’d stayed. Becca’s father had some kind of hold on certain women, a certain flaw in their character surely, but damned if Becca could figure out what it was.
“Well, what do you think?” Jackie asked. “Can you find it in your heart to stick around?” The teapot whistled. She turned to remove it from the burner.
“I don’t know,” Becca said. “I don’t think so. I need to think about it.”
Jackie poured a cup of tea and set it on the table in front of her. “Well, don’t take too long. He doesn’t have much time left.”
Becca no longer wanted tea. She wanted to get away from this woman who asked too much of her. She wanted to tell her it was more complicated than simply agreeing to say yes, she would stay. Did she even have a choice?
“I need some air,” Becca said. She needed space to think. But what she needed most was to get away from the stench of sickness, a mixture of alcohol and bodily fluids that permeated the walls and saturated the stagnant air.
Outside, she took a deep breath, stared at her father’s lawn that was no longer manicured to perfection. Crabgrass and weeds had taken hold of the yard, choking out the plush, green blades of grass. The sight was at once heart-wrenching and disturbing. If she’d had any doubt, any buried hope that his condition wasn’t as serious as she’d been led to believe, the state of his yard had quashed it. She looked up at his bedroom window. What had been the point of all the mowing and fertilizing, the tending, the caring, when in the end, all that was left was weeds?
She didn’t know.
She had never understood her father’s reasons for doing the things he’d done. She crossed her arms against the chill. Then she closed her eyes, listened to the trickle of the stream in the woods behind her father’s house, remembered how the same stream ran behind John’s barn on its way to feed the river.
Eight-year-old Becca picked her way through the backyard, stopped, looked over her shoulder at her father. He was standing in the driveway next to his pickup truck, holding the rifle he’d shot the doe with the week before. She still had mixed feelings about the doe’s death, about him.
She turned back around, walked into the woods behind their house. She swatted gnats from her face, steered clear of the maple tree with the beehive in it. She stomped the ground, making as much noise as possible with the hope that John was in the woods tracking deer, honing his skills as a hunter, and he would hear her.
He stepped from behind a hemlock tree. She started.
“Was that you making all that racket?” he teased. He was wearing a jean jacket, the ends frayed where the sleeves were ripped off, the word Prospect stitched above the left breast pocket. He had patchy fuzz on his chin and above his lip, not enough to look like a man, but too much to look like a boy anymore.
“Want to catch bullfrogs?” she asked.
“Can’t.”
“Crayfish?”
He shook his head.
“What do you want to do then?”
“I brought you something,” he said.
She eyed him suspiciously. “How did you know you’d see me?”
“I took a chance.”
“What is it?”
He reached under the hemlock tree, picked up an old barn cat lying underneath. “I thought you could use a friend,” he said and handed it to her. “I know I haven’t been around much. The club keeps me pretty busy these days.”
The cat’s fur was matted, lacked any shine to it. Its meow sounded lonely. It curled itself in Becca’s arms, pushed its cheeks against her hand, looking for affection.
“You can’t tell anyone where you got her. It has to be our secret,” he said.
“I won’t tell.” Her father would be mad. He didn’t like John. He didn’t get along with John’s father, Russell, his own stepbrother. She didn’t understand why they fought with each other but thought it had something to do with Russell and his motorcycle friends and Becca’s father being chief of police.
“Okay, well, she’s a pretty good mouser, but you’re still going to need to feed her,” John said. “And maybe you can have your mom check her for fleas.”
“Okay.”
“Take care of her,” he said. “I have to get going.”
“When will I see you again?”
“I think it’s best if I keep my distance from now on.”
“Why?”
He touched the pocket where the word Prospect was written. “It just is.”
She thought he looked sad about it. It made her sad too. She hugged the cat closely, searching for and finding comfort in its warm body, its purr.
CHAPTER SIX
It was dark by the time Becca left her father’s house. She still didn’t have any clear idea whether she would be returning. She walked into the condo and found Matt relaxing on the leather chair in front of the fireplace, sipping a glass of red wine. He was wearing one of the shirts she liked best, a simple gray T-shirt with navy-blue piping at the collar and sleeves. His legs were stretched out in front of him. His feet were bare. She recognized the serious expression on his face, the one he wore whenever he was deep in thought.
She entered the room. He immediately pulled himself up, his eyes searching hers. “How’d it go?” he asked.
She plopped onto the chair across from him. She wasn’t sure if he was asking about her trip home to see her father or about the surgery on the golden retriever earlier that morning. She chose to answer the latter. “The surgery went well. No complications. She should be feeling like her old self in a few days.”
Romy trotted in from the kitchen, mouth dripping with water. She pushed her nose against Matt’s hand until he stroked her head, her chest, behind her ears. The dog whined with pleasure. Becca couldn’t help but smile.
“I’m glad the surgery was a success.” He cleared his throat. “But what about the other thing? How did that go?”
She took a moment to collect her thoughts. “He’s really sick. More than I thought. I mean, I knew he was. My mother talks with him on occasion. So I knew.” She paused. “I knew about the cancer. I just didn’t know how bad it had gotten.”
Matt looked puzzled. “Why didn’t you say anything to me before if you knew he was sick? I mean, jeez, Bec, cancer?”
She touched her forehead. A headache was coming on. “I guess I didn’t want to deal with it.” She realized that was the absolute truth. She didn’t want to deal with her father, his illness, but most of all she didn’t want to deal with their relationship or lack of one. It was too damned hard.
Matt got up and knelt on the floor in front of her, taking her hands in his. “I’m sorry. This must be very difficult for you. What can I do?”
She touched his sculpted face, the high cheekbone, the curve of h
is jaw. Any other time she would’ve gotten up and walked away, unyielding in her resolve to keep him at a distance and, in a perverse way, only making him want her more. But she didn’t have it in her to push him away tonight. Tonight, she needed his arms around her, holding her. When he leaned forward and brushed his lips on hers, she responded, lacing her hands through his hair, pressing her body against him, collapsing into his strong arms.
He held her for a long time, kneeling on the floor in front of her. She squeezed his back and shoulders tightly. Neither one spoke. All the anger and frustration she’d felt toward him for his failure to come home the night before slowly dissipated. She kissed his neck and ear, suddenly wanting to take back what was hers, her life here with him, and forget about her troubles across the river.
Matt scooped her in his arms, laid her on the floor in front of the fire. His kisses were deep and full of apology. She lifted his shirt over his head and pulled him to her, running her hands over the muscles along his spine, clinging to him as though it were the first time.
When they separated, she rolled to her side, stared at the crackling fire. Matt tucked his body behind her. They lay on the floor without speaking for several long minutes. It was Becca who broke the silence first.
“My dad wants me to come home,” she said. “To be with him.” She swallowed hard. “In the end.”
The muscles in Matt’s arms constricted, his body tensed up. “Are you going to do it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay.” His voice was low, guarded. He was quiet for a long time. “If you decide to go, what will you do about the clinic?”
“Vicky can cover most of it for me. I’d just hate to lose the money.” She wasn’t a partner in the clinic yet, and she relied on her paycheck. She had student loans to pay back and credit card bills. She’d put herself through veterinary school on her own, and she took a tremendous amount of pride in that, but it had been costly. She lived from one paycheck to the next, knowing in a few years her loans would be paid off and things would turn around. Until then she made do on a tight budget.
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