Chapter 10
10
Dexter
I used to watch Charlie Brown a lot as a kid. My favorite was It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. I always remember how the grown-ups talked in the movie. They never said actual words. It was just a whomp-whomp noise that sounded like someone was talking to you while you had your ears covered.
Those are the exact sounds ringing through my head right now. I hear Janet’s voice, all distorted and wonky, but I don’t hear actual coherent words.
“My surgery is scheduled for next week. When I go in, we’ll?—”
“I-I don’t understand,” I finally say, cutting her off mid-sentence. She looks up at me, her hands wrapped around the frosty glass still full of strawberry and cream whipped together with a cherry on top. Jukebox music plays around us and the rectangular table in the middle of the small booth we’re sitting in as I try to process what she just told me.
“It’s stage three lung cancer,” she elaborates after tossing the word “cancer” at me without so much as a warning. Then again, is there really a way to warm up to that word? That threatening, ominous word that feels like the world is crumbling underneath me.
“You don’t even smoke.”
“You don’t have to be a smoker to have cancer.”
“But you’re healthy,” I continue to argue. “I don’t think I’ve ever even seen you have more than two glasses of wine. And you run a 5K, like, every Thanksgiving for that Turkey Trot thing. And?—”
“Dex,” she calls, regaining my attention. She doesn’t say anything else. Instead, she looks at me with silently pleading eyes. And I feel like a complete asshole. So instead of continuing this demand for answers to questions that feel irrelevant at this point, I sigh.
“Sorry,” I say with a deep breath. I take a long pull of my milkshake.
When Janet and I were kids, we traveled to Brooklyn from South Jersey often to visit our grandparents when they were alive. We were surrounded by smaller, quieter towns and beachy streets, so a visit to the city was always a big deal. We’d hop into my parent’s minivan, duffel bags packed to the brim with pajamas and board games, and drive my parents crazy during the two-hour drive to Brooklyn. And because we spent as much time here as we could—three-day weekends, holidays, or long stretches of time over the summer—we grew attached to the one spot that made the best mint chocolate chip milkshakes and onion rings, The Lunch Car. Whether it was to get us out of the house when we became a little too stir-crazy or to appease a late-night, post-dinner snack craving, a thick, cheek-hollowing milkshake, a steamy serving of onion rings still glistening with hot oil, and our grandparents ushering us into an empty booth always did the trick.
But now, the same basket of onion rings, cooled and untouched, alongside the milkshake that suddenly tastes like cardboard, is doing nothing to soothe the numbness coursing through my head.
What makes things worse is that we don’t have a cozy two-bedroom apartment to go back to after this where my grandma would most likely be baking some pie and my grandpa would return to whatever home improvement project he was working on that week. And for some reason, knowing we’ll be working through this just the two of us makes it that much scarier. If there were ever a time I needed a mom or a dad, or even a gruff grandfather or a snuggly grandma, right now would be the time.
We sit in silence for a minute before Janet picks up an onion ring and takes a crunchy bite. “So what happens from here?” I ask, my gaze fixed on my milkshake.
My big sister has cancer .
She takes a deep, cleansing breath. “Like I said, my surgery’s scheduled for next week. On the nineteenth,” she explains, her voice in full problem-solving mode. “And then…most likely chemo.”
I nod. I keep my eyes focused on the space in front of me, making it obvious I’m avoiding her. But then she reaches for my hand. She gives it a firm squeeze, and I finally look at her.
“Dexter,” she urges. Her voice comes out shaky and scared.
“We’re going to get through it,” I assure her, though the shattered fragments of my composure are hanging by a thread. I might just break down right into the pool of liquifying whipped cream in front of me.
Her response is to nod, though the up and down movement of her head is slow and uncertain.
“Does Charles know?” I ask.
“Yeah,” she answers, her voice sounding less guarded as we veer our conversation away from treatment and prognosis. Her phone chirps on the table just then. She turns it over in her hand and looks over whatever alert she has set on her phone. “I have to get back to the gallery.”
I look at my watch. It’s close to eight, well past her usual office hours. “It’s late.”
“I know,” she says, gathering her things. “I have to get a few things before I go back home.”
“I’ll walk you.”
She shakes her head. “I can get there on my own. And Charles is going to meet me there,” she explains. “He’s going to stay with me until I need to lock up.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine.”
I sigh. “Okay,” I answer, defeated. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Can you do me a favor?”
I look at my sister. Her pleading, downturned eyes peer up at me, and her hand lightly grips my forearm. “Don’t let this cancer define me,” she says, a calm assertiveness in her voice. “I’m still me. This is just something I’m going to have to beat.”
I choke back the enormous knot in my throat through a nod.
This is my big sister. The one I’ve been looking up to for my entire life. She’s been my rock. When I graduated high school, she was the one standing front and center, waving a big sign with my face blown up and plastered on a poster board. She was the one who took me in when I first moved to the city, letting me crash on her couch for a week before I moved to my own place. She was the only one who was able to pull me out of myself when our parents died. What if I lose her? Who would I have? I would be all alone in this world. The version of myself that existed with Janet would be a distant memory, long forgotten with no one to relive those memories with.
I’m slowly walking back to my apartment, the heat dissipating into something cooler now that the day has eased into night. My gaze is settled on the concrete ground, aimlessly tracking the crooked cracks that trace between the divided squares. As I near the streets closer to my apartment, I get a text message from Janet letting me know she’s safely at the gallery and that Charles is already there with her, to which I respond with a quick thumbs-up emoji.
As I’m shoving my phone back into my pocket, I look up into a storefront. It’s a wine and cheese store. There are large cheese wheels on display at the window along with an entire wall of various wines on the opposite side. When I peer inside, I see people moving about the wine racks. Nothing out of the ordinary usual retail traffic. But then I see someone familiar perusing the large wine wall, right in between two wooden barrels showcasing triangle blocks of parmesan.
Is that…?
No, it can’t be. She should be thousands of miles away. On the opposite coast.
Curiosity getting the better part of me, I enter the store. When I walk toward the wine wall, I stop.
It is her.
“Lucy?”
The last image I have of Lucy engraved in my mind is of her sitting at the edge of my bed, her bare back facing me with the light cascading from the windows onto my messy bed, creating shadows that outlined her curves. Her arms were holding up the thin, flat sheet to cover her front, and she thought I was dozing off into a lazy, post-coital slumber. But I wasn’t. Instead, I was watching her through heavily lidded eyes. I peeked at the way her body rose from my bed and her blonde hair tumbled down to the middle of her back. I paid attention to how her body reacted when my fingers grazed over the two hollowed dimples between her hips, and she smiled at me over her shoulder. I swear, I would give my left arm to hear her giggle the way she did when I yanked her back onto the bed, the sheets tangling between us while she fell limp in my arms. And probably even my right arm to hear her moan the way she did when she wrapped her legs around my waist.
“Dexter! ”
She’s dressed in distressed jeans, a loose fitting T-shirt, and white Converse. The large wine bottle she was examining slackens in her grip as she turns to face me. I look around to see a couple of faces turn in our direction after Lucy practically shrieked my name, looking equal parts shocked and panicked.
“Are you visiting Nat?” I ask, sauntering a step closer to her.
“Uh…um,” she stammers. Her eyes shift to the door, then back to the wine that’s still in her hand. She places it back on the wooden racks, shoving it into the nearest available slot. “I-I, um…”
“Is everything okay?”
She sighs and starts gnawing on her bottom lip while refusing to meet my eyes. “Dexter,” she finally says. “No one can know I’m here.”
My head jerks back, and my expression twists sideways. “Huh?”
She doesn’t answer me. She just shifts on her feet, looking so uncomfortable. Her hand comes up to her face, and she cups her cheek, her eyes turning down into the saddest set of puppy eyes.
“Lucy,” I say softly, getting her attention. “What’s going on?”