Chapter 8
EIGHT
Each one of those ninety minutes passed very, very slowly.
But it wasn’t a waste of time entirely. No, when the credits finally rolled, Hanna had a fresh list of newly discovered medical trauma for Olivia to help her sort through.
Productive.
When she finally checked her phone in the theater lobby while waiting for Chloe to leave the bathroom, she had thirty-two text messages and several missed calls.
None of them seemed like anything she wanted to return.
As they exited the theater, Chloe rambled on about how much she just loved old movies.
Hanna couldn’t recall a single scene.
“I’m so glad we ran into you, Hanna! This was a great midday break,” Chloe said, throwing her arms around Hanna’s neck.
“Yes,” Hanna said. “Great.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Chloe said to Milo, placing a kiss gently on his cheek before flitting off to wherever manic-pixie-dream-girls went to recharge in San Francisco.
“I am so, so sorry,” Milo said before Chloe was even around the corner. He walked, and Hanna followed. She didn’t care where they went, as long as they were moving.
“It’s okay, she had no idea,” Hanna said, waving her hand. She meant well, as people always did.
“You never actually told me how your mom died.” Milo glanced up and down the street before crossing.
“You never told me how your dad died.”
Milo shoved his hands in his pockets. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours?”
Hanna sighed. “Fine. But if I’m going to trauma dump on you, I need to be in a dark, grungy bar, not in direct sunlight where you can see me sad in high definition.”
Milo stopped and thought about that for a second, checking his phone. It was still early in the day, but surely somewhere was open for the depressed.
He started walking again. “There’s a place not far from here I like. Dingy, definitely accustomed to pretty women crying in the booths.”
Hanna gasped dramatically. “You think I’m pretty?”
He rolled his eyes. “Don’t be like that.”
“Like what? Gorgeous?” Hanna batted her lashes, enjoying the moment of levity.
“I didn’t say—”
“Stunning? Breathtaking?”
Milo threw his head back and laughed. “You’re a real pain in the ass, you know that?”
She flipped her hair over her shoulder. “My god! Enough with the compliments, Milo! You’re making me blush.”
“Jesus Christ, now I need a drink,” he mumbled, leading her around a corner and down another block before stopping abruptly at a thick, wooden door with a small sign in the window that read simply, LOUNGE.
The shift from the bright street to the near-black bar strained her eyes as they adjusted to the row of dim glass fixtures hanging over five crinkled vinyl booths.
A shiny bar with ornate carvings on its corners lined the far wall.
It looked like it had lived there for a century, and certainly smelled like that was the case too.
It was perfect.
A low hum from an ancient jukebox whispered seventies hits, a whining guitar running beneath Milo’s instructions on where to sit before he glided to the bar and ordered for two.
It was only them and the bartender, the ideal situation for her impending breakdown.
“Starting a tab?” the bartender asked.
“Put it on the owner’s,” Milo quipped. The bartender rolled his eyes. Hanna guessed they were friends.
“They’ve got this bourbon just in from Texas you have to try,” Milo said, plunking two glasses onto the table between them.
“You seem to think I’ll like an awful lot of whiskeys,” she said.
Milo arched a brow. “Have I steered you wrong yet?”
“Hmm, I guess not,” she conceded and clinked the glass against his. She took a cautious sip, ice hitting her lips first, and tasted the sweet vanilla notes as they drifted downward. He was right, she did like it. “It’s good.”
“Told you.”
Milo fell silent. She knew what he wanted to hear, but she needed at least a second drink to say it.
“You have to go first,” she said.
“Me?”
“The person with the longest Dead Parent Society tenure goes first, duh.” Hanna sipped more of her whiskey, trying to get a buzz going before she'd inevitably crash the mood.
“Damn, I must not have gotten my copy of the rules,” Milo huffed.
“Well, we’re not very good with follow-through at the DPS. Between the depression and the paperwork…”
“Too true,” he groaned. He threw back half his bourbon and rolled up his sleeves. The motion reminded Hanna that she was, indeed, wearing his flannel shirt, and her face flushed to a deep scarlet. “Man, it’s been a while since I told the full story. Where to start?”
His face contemplated which threads of the story to include, and she could tell he wasn't lying when he'd told her it never got better. She could see it in the way his jaw clenched around the words.
All the pain rushed to his green eyes in an instant, and she was looking at a fifteen-year-old boy, not a thirty-year-old man.
“Well, you know I was in high school. It was a week before Spring Break, we were in class and the teacher’s phone rang. After all these years, that’s what I remember most vividly. The look on her face when she told me they wanted me in the office and to bring my stuff.”
Milo took a long sip of his drink.
“She wouldn’t tell me why. I just assumed I was in trouble for something stupid.
I was a bit of a problem child,” he admitted.
“Anyway, I walked into the office and my aunt was there. My dad’s sister.
She’d been crying, I could see it all over her face.
The school counselor was there too. I knew at that point something was wrong, but I never would have guessed… ”
Milo trailed off, swallowing as his eyes scanned the bar.
“They pulled me into this stupid room with glass windows. That’s all I could think about. If anyone walked by, they’d see me fall apart. So I did my best to keep it together. Motorcycle accident,” Milo said, his face reddening. “He was changing lanes on the highway and a truck didn’t see him.”
“Fuck,” Hanna whispered. “That’s awful.”
“Yeah, I mean, it was quick. That’s really all I have to hold onto, I guess.”
“Tell me more about him,” she said. “What was his name?”
Milo’s lips dropped into the kind of smile she gave anyone who asked about her mom. It wasn’t a pure thing, sparked by joy or nostalgia. It was the bitter release of the fear that she’d already answered the last question about her.
“Elias. Greek as hell, he grew up in Crete but moved here as a teenager. He was a really big guy, but super soft spoken. You had to lean in to hear him. But he was fucking funny. Not in that typical dad-joke way. You always knew if he was opening his mouth, it was going to be good.”
Milo paused, laughing at something that crawled into his mind. She wanted to slip into it, live in the memory with him.
“I really resent him, you know? For being such a damned good dad. Thirty years ago, men didn’t give a fuck about their kids, but he did. He was helpful around the house. He was obsessed with my mom.”
“I feel like the only answer to this is ‘as well as she could,’ but how did she handle it all?”
Milo’s face fell. “My poor mom. She had three teenage boys to deal with, and none of us made it easier on her. I think a piece of her died with him, you know? She just… she never really recovered. Still hasn’t remarried.
I think it just gutted her. It’s better now, but those first five years were like living with a ghost.”
Hanna nodded. “Does she date at all?”
“Oh,” Milo sighed. “I don’t know. I’m sure she does. But she’s never introduced anyone, so maybe not?”
“How many girls have you brought home?” Hanna asked, a playful smile unfurling.
“Fair point,” Milo said. “Either way, that’s none of my business.”
“And fifteen years and three therapists later, you’re content to never engage in anything that might put you at risk of repeating your biggest trauma.”
“Nailed it, Arizona.”
“Are you the oldest?” she asked.
Milo’s head tilted. “The baby, actually. Why?”
“You just give off a bit of a big brother thing,” Hanna said.
Milo’s forehead crinkled. “You think of me like a brother?”
“No,” Hanna said. “Maybe.”
“Unfortunate.”
Hanna finished her whiskey. “Not that it matters, since you don’t date.”
“Right,” he said. “You’ve successfully avoided your turn long enough.”
Hanna exhaled, the breath shaky. “My turn.” She pushed her empty glass to the end of the table.
“Alright, well, you already know that I had just broken up with Logan, so the timing wasn’t ideal.
But one day, I was sitting in a meeting, and my phone kept blowing up.
Over and over. I talked to my mom every single day, on the way to and from work, so if she was calling outside of that, I knew something was wrong before I even answered. ”
Hanna pushed down the creeping chill in her spine.
“It wasn’t her, it was her coworker calling from her phone. She’d passed out in the middle of lunch. They took her to the emergency room for a laceration on her head, and her white blood cell count was through the roof.”
She could hear the tears pooling on her tongue, building as she relived the worst weeks of her life. She’d never told the story out loud before.
“They did a CT scan, and it came back with mets on just about every inch of her body. Honestly, every doctor we talked to was floored that she was still walking. She’d been losing weight for a month or two, but she was a woman in her fifties—she was always dieting.
They thought the first tumor was a glioblastoma but, in the end, it didn’t really matter.
It had spread so badly, she’d probably been sick for months, maybe years. It was hard to trace it all.”
“Shit,” Milo whispered. He didn’t say he was sorry, or that it must have been so hard. Like Sara, he understood the value of just sitting in the pain. Hanna tapped her hands against the table, willing the tears away.