Chapter 4 #2
“That too.” I sit back on my heels and just breathe. A draft sneaks under the door and brushes my ankles. I press my palm flat on his knee through the blanket. Warm. Thank god.
My dad cocks his head and studies me. “You know I’m right about some of this.”
I don’t answer.
“You could say you don’t still like him, and I’d leave it be.” His mouth quirks. “But you’re not saying that.”
I make a face at him because it’s easier than words. He chuckles, then coughs, I get up and rub his back. When it passes, I help him shift in the chair, so his hips don’t ache later, slide a pillow behind him, adjust the blanket edge again.
“Do you remember teaching me to drive?” I ask, buying time, giving us both something else to look at. “You said if I learned on the old truck, anything else would feel like a miracle.”
“Your mother called that child abuse,” he says fondly.
“Mom also said you should stop trying to fix things you didn’t know how to fix.”
“She wasn’t wrong,” he admits. “Though I maintain you can learn a lot by breaking something and then figuring out how to put it back together.”
“I’d prefer if you leave the breaking part out.” I swallow because my voice came out thinner than I want it to be.
Sadness flickers across his face. “Your mother used to say the same thing.” His voice roughens slightly. “She always thought I could fix anything if I just worked hard enough.”
I go still.
For a second, all I can picture is Mom at the kitchen table in one of her soft cardigans, smiling while Dad rambles through another half-finished home repair project.
I barely remember the real woman anymore.
Mostly I remember the illness. The exhaustion.
The smell of hospitals and antiseptic and reheated coffee.
“She fought hard,” I say quietly.
“She did.” His eyes drift toward the muted television without really seeing it. “Hard enough that for a while we all thought she’d beat it.”
My chest tightens.
That’s the part people don’t understand about losing someone slowly. Hope keeps moving the finish line. One more treatment. One more specialist. One more good scan. Everybody keeps talking like the future is still negotiable right up until it suddenly isn’t.
I think about Caleb calling from Kansas City while I sat beside Mom’s hospital bed pretending everything was temporary. Pretending we still had time to figure things out later.
“We really thought she was getting better for a while,” I murmur.
Dad nods once. “And while all that was happening, you kept putting your own life on hold without complaint.”
“I made my choices.”
“You were too young to have to make choices like that.” The words land harder than they should.
I busy my hands with straightening the blanket again even though it doesn’t need it. “Caleb had residency. He couldn’t exactly commute back and forth every weekend.”
“No.” Dad watches me carefully. “But I think the two of you kept waiting for life to calm down long enough to find each other again.”
The lump in my throat burns.
Because that’s exactly what happened.
Just exhaustion and distance and grief wearing us down one phone call at a time until eventually there wasn’t enough energy left to keep pretending we weren’t slipping apart.
Dad reaches over and pats my hand. “I’m just saying maybe you shouldn’t decide something’s broken before you even try touching it again.”
I make a noncommittal sound.
His fingers tighten around my hand. “All right. Let me put it another way. I’m selfish.”
I snort despite myself. “You?”
“Yes. I want to see you happy while I’m still around to enjoy it.”
“That is manipulative.” I try to give him a firm frown, but the corner of my mouth won’t behave.
“Effective, though.”
I stare at the fabric in my hands and think about Caleb’s note on the counter two nights ago.
Call if you need anything. It should have read like a standard line scribbled at the bottom of a patient sheet.
It didn’t. It sat there all evening like a hand stretched out across a narrow bridge, steady, patient, palm up.
“You could just go out for coffee,” Dad says, too casual. “People do that.”
“I have coffee here.” The protest sounds dull even to me.
“Uh-huh.”
“And a dog,” I add, reaching for humor and missing by a mile. “I’ll get a dog so I have company.” My voice quivers on the last word.
“That’s not the same thing.” He shakes his head, and his eyes go solemn. “And you know it.”
I feel the words like a small, clean slice. I look at his face and wish I could promise him easy things, wish I could string reassurance across the room like lights and forget the cords that keep them plugged in. “I can’t… I can’t promise anything.”
“I’m not asking you to,” he says. “I’m asking you to pay attention to your own heart the way you pay attention to mine.”
We sit with that. The clock ticks. A car passes out on County Road 8, the sound dreary and distant.
Somewhere under the house, the pipes settle with a small thud.
I fold the towel carefully, make the edges match, tuck it over the oven handle.
He watches me the whole time, a smile ghosting the edges of his mouth like he knows I’m buying seconds I can’t spend.
“You’re tired,” I say.
“I am,” he admits. “But I feel… better.” He lingers on the word like it tastes good. “And I’d feel even better if you took that book you keep pretending you don’t want to read and sat down for twenty minutes.”
“It isn’t pretend,” I say, but I move to the cupboard anyway and pull out the chipped mug with the sunflower.
I fill it with hot water and drop in a teabag.
The steam curls against my face and fogs my vision for a heartbeat.
I set the mug on the table and fetch the book from the little stack by the door.
I read it in subways of time now, a page here, a paragraph there, always ready to spring up if he needs something.
When I go back to the chair across from him, he catches my wrist before I sit. His fingers are cool. Mine are not. He squeezes once, then lets go. The squeeze says a lot. It says thank you. It says sorry. It says please.
“Twenty minutes,” he says. “Doctor’s orders.”
I huff. “You are not a doctor.”
“I’m deputized.” He chuckles at his own joke until the chuckle turns to a small cough. I wait, count the beats, watch his chest rise and fall. It steadies. I sit.
The tea is too hot to drink. I hold the mug anyway, letting the heat seep into my fingers and the tendons of my palm. Dad closes his eyes, not sleeping yet, just resting. I open the book and read the same sentence twice before any of it sticks.
Dr. Chambers’ face keeps sliding between the lines.
I’ve seen different sides of the man. The first clinical and focused, the second unguarded in the kitchen, his mouth softening as he looked at me.
The memory lands like a warm weight low in my stomach.
It brings a sting of shame with it, too, because the house is quiet and my father is breathing in the chair across from me and there is a place inside me that wants something that has nothing to do with medicine or caretaking or duty.
I have to admit, if even just to myself, I like both sides of him.
Dad’s breathing evens. I watch a minute longer and then read another page, then another. Twenty minutes pass, then thirty. When the heater turns off, the silence that follows feels clean rather than empty.
I get up, tuck the blanket around his shoulders, and ease the recliner back a notch.
He doesn’t stir. In the kitchen, I rinse the tea mug, set it to dry, and wipe the counter even though it doesn’t need it.
The note Dr. Chambers left on the sideboard two days ago peeks out from under the saltshaker.
Call if you need anything. I touch the corner with one finger and pull it free.
The paper has gone soft at the edge where steam and time found it.
I tuck it back and tell myself to stop being ridiculous.
When I turn off the kitchen light, the window becomes a black square with my face hovering in it.
I hardly recognize the woman there. Her hair is coming loose, flour dusts the sleeve of her cardigan, and there is a mark at the corner of her mouth that looks like a smile got started and changed its mind.
I pad down the hall and pause at living room door.
He snores once, quietly, then shifts. I count three breaths, then four.
I go up to my room and change into a clean T-shirt, the fabric soft against skin that hasn’t known silk in years.
I sit on the edge of the bed and let my thoughts collect like marbles in a bowl.
They clack against each other and refuse to sit still.
I am not sixteen anymore. I am not empty-headed or desperate or foolish.
But I am… lonely. The word fits in my mouth like a seed you’re not sure you should swallow.
It doesn’t taste bad. It just tastes real.
And the worst part, the only man I want, still want is Caleb.
Neither of us ever really chose to end it.
There wasn’t a screaming fight. Just phone calls interrupted by hospital machines and overnight shifts and exhaustion.
Mom kept getting weaker while Caleb sounded more tired every time he called from Kansas City.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped talking about visits and started talking about bills, remission, medications, and residency hours instead.
One day I realized three weeks had passed since we’d last said I love you without forcing cheerfulness into our voices first. And time stretched and I simply didn’t bother to pick up the phone anymore and Caleb stopped calling.
“People need people,” Dad said. Not women need men. Not you need a husband. Just… people. Company. Touch. Love.