“Yes,” Marilyn flashed tearfully, defiantly, “I swore. I did.”
“I heard you.”
“Then hear this—I don’t want to die without dignity. I need to be me. Do you understand? I need to feel like me.”
“I hear you, Mom.”
“It’s time now to bring in someone else. A nurse or nursing assistant—”
“You mean after Dad gets home?”
“No. Before Dad gets home. Then when I need help…like this…the nurse will do it and your dad won’t have to be part of it.”
“Okay.”
“And when it’s at the end…we’ll find me a good place for hospice care. I’ve been looking into it for a while and there are two wonderful places…they’re both great options. I want you to talk to the administrators today, make sure they remember me—”
“You don’t want to…die…here at home?”
“No. Dad has to live in this house after I’m gone. I’m not going to have him remembering me in a bed, dead. Or me getting last rights. Or waiting for the ambulance or coroners to come. Not going to leave him with those memories. Won’t become a ghost in my own house.”
Kit couldn’t speak. She just nodded once.
“Good.” Mom managed a smile. “And now that we have that settled, I’ll let you help me to the bathroom to clean this…you know…off of me.”
Kit spent the afternoon on the phone talking with a service that provided nursing care at home. Mom had been very specific that she wanted around-the-clock care so that Dad was no longer tied to the house because of her, and she insisted the help started Saturday or Sunday morning so the aide could get familiar with the house, and Marilyn’s needs, before Dad came home.
“Dad’s not going to like walking in the door and discovering everything’s changed while he was gone,” Kit warned her, after hanging up from the service, who had promised to have someone at the house eight Sunday morning and then around-the-clock from there.
“It’s what I want,” Marilyn retorted.
“I understand, but this is Dad’s home, too—”
“And it will be solely his house in just a couple weeks. But until then, he can adapt to having someone here, assisting me.” She toyed with the lace on the edge of her ivory bed jacket. “I’m not doing this to hurt your dad. I’m doing it because I love him.”
I
t was a long afternoon.
Kit sat next to her mom’s bed from two until almost four making phone calls. Her mom sat quietly, listening, as Kit talked to the agency that would provide home health care, and then to the hospice facilities her mom approved of. By the time she was finally finished, she was exhausted.
Marilyn had been dozing during the last forty-five minutes of the last call, and she woke with a start, blinking at Kit. “What did I miss?”
Kit smiled at her, patted her arm. “Nothing.”
“I was sleeping again.”
“It’s okay. The conversation was boring.” Kit drew her chair closer to the bed. “Thirsty?” she asked, reaching for the tall plastic water bottle with the flexible straw.
Her mother tipped her head forward to sip slowly. “You’re taking very good care of me, Katherine Elizabeth.”
“Thank you.”
“You would have made a good nurse.”
“Oh, I’m much happier being a teacher.”
“You like your books.”
“And my kids.” Kit put the water bottle back on the nightstand and reached for the little tub of Vaseline to dab on her mother’s lips. Her skin was always so dry now.
“Then I give you an A-plus-plus.”
“A-plus-plus? That’s awfully generous. Should help my GPA.”
“Where are you applying to school now?”
“Life school…motherhood.”
“Motherhood?”
Kit nodded. “I want to be a mom.”
“You will be someday.”
Kit heard the
someday
and knew what it meant. Someday, after she found a man and got married. Someday, when she was a wife and properly settled. “I don’t trust someday,” she said. “Someday is like maybe. Not very definite.”
“You can’t really control those things.”
“I think I can.”
“Do you have some news for me?” There was a flicker of excitement in her mother’s eyes. “The guy you’re seeing…the one from Chevron?”
Kit nearly shuddered.
“No.”
“Why not? You said he was nice.”
“He’s also quite married.”
“Oh, Kit, no!”
“Yes.”
“When did you find that out?”
“When he announced he was enrolling his stepdaughter at my school.”
“Oh, Kit. Yuck.” Her mother made a face.
“I know.”
“So how do you plan to do this? Who’s your magic man?”
“He’s a Chia Pet, Mom. I ordered him off TV. I just water him and he grows.”
Her mother didn’t even crack a smile.
“That was a joke, Mom.” Kit reached for the Lubriderm lotion, squirted a little bit into her palm, and then took her mother’s right hand to gently massage the cream into her soft skin. “But I’m not joking when I say I’m wanting to become a mom, and there are a lot of single mothers out there doing a fantastic job.”
“That’s not God’s plan.”
“Did He tell you that? He hasn’t told me.”
Marilyn pulled her hand out of Kit’s. “If you just be patient, you will have everything you ever wanted.”
“Is that what you tell Tommy and Cass? For them to just be patient? No. I know it’s not. I know you’ve spoken with Cass about adoption. I know you’re waiting for the right moment to approach Tommy.”
“That’s different, Kit. They’ve been married ten years. But you’re still young. You have plenty of time yet—”
“I’m forty.”
“Plenty of forty-year-olds still have children. And that’s something you can explore down the road.”
Someday…
Down the road…
Marilyn reached for the TV remote on the nightstand and hit the power button. “Let’s see if we can find something to watch. I’m pretty sure we recorded
American Idol
last night.”
Kit stared at her mother’s profile, willing her to look at her, finish the conversation.
She didn’t.
Heart heavy, Kit stood up, gathered the dishes and water bottle from the side of the bed. “I’m going to get you some fresh water and a snack. Is there something special you’d like?”
Her mother glanced at her, smiled as if nothing significant had just happened. “I’d love some more of that cantaloupe from breakfast if there is any left. I think it was the best cantaloupe I’ve ever had.”
The best cantaloupe…
In the kitchen, Kit paced back and forth, fighting to box up her wild emotions so that she could return to her mother’s room, calm and cool and sweet and loving…
But she was far from calm, cool, or loving right now. She was angry and frustrated. So frustrated.
She’d never been the type to make waves, had never argued with her parents or rebelled in high school. Brianna was the rebel. Swashbuckling Brianna, who took the risks, ignored advice, cheerfully, defiantly cutting her own path through life.
But right now Kit wished she’d been more like Bree. Wished she had just an ounce of Brianna’s fire.
During childhood and adolescence, it had pained Kit to watch Brianna be punished for being a free spirit. But the discipline and consequences didn’t deter Bree. If anything, she just got wilder. By eighth grade she had a reputation for putting out, and by her freshman year of high school she’d already had a couple of scrapes with the law. Being sent to juvenile court would have crushed Kit, but it made no impression on Bree.
Brianna made it clear she didn’t care what her parents or the priest or the police thought. She got through school because she was brilliant. She didn’t do homework, or lab work, but she had a photographic memory and would skim through her textbooks the night before an exam and then pass the test with flying colors.
It made her teachers crazy.
And so she skated through life, doing what she wanted, mocking those who criticized her, until one day she got so stoned she forgot she was babysitting a six-year-old at their house. The little girl wandered outside and was discovered floating facedown in the Brennan pool by their father, who’d come home unexpectedly early from work. He never came home early, not even he knew why, that day, he felt compelled to go home, but thank God he had. Dad jumped into the pool and performed CPR until the ambulance
arrived, and the little girl eventually recovered. Divine intervention, Mom called it.
Everyone said prayers. Everyone was grateful.
Brianna shrugged it off.
And Dad flipped out. He stopped talking to Bree, wouldn’t even look at her, or acknowledge her when she sat down at the dinner table.
Mom hated it.
Kit tried not to take sides—Bree was her twin—but she understood Dad’s anger, understood that shame. He’d dedicated his life to protecting people and then his own daughter nearly killed a child because she selfishly chose to get high.
That whole year, from the middle of Bree and Kit’s sophomore year of high school and into the beginning of their junior year, was awful. Kit hated remembering. Her parents were at complete odds. Dinner every night was excruciatingly tense. They sat around their dining room table in silence. They’d do dishes without speaking, moving swiftly, mechanically, to finish so they could escape back upstairs.
The fall of her junior year was the one and only time Kit’s parents went to counseling. Dad didn’t want to go, and only complied because Mom threatened to leave him if he didn’t.
Brianna, she told him, was a teenager. She’d made a mistake. People were human. And if he couldn’t recognize that what his daughter needed from him was compassion and forgiveness, then Marilyn no longer saw a future for them because she’d had it with his useless, stupid, destructive disappointment and rage.
Dad had choice words for Mom, blaming her for indulging Brianna, failing to enforce consequences, constantly giving her too much freedom, and Mom fought back, pointing out that Uncle Liam came from
his
side of the family, not hers, and that she wouldn’t be listening to any more of his personal attacks.
Oh, Mom could be fierce. She knew when and how to fight,
and she only took on Dad when she had no other choice. They didn’t battle often, but when they did, everyone else lay low. You did not want to draw their attention then, or get in the way.
And Kit, being the good daughter, had grown up lying low, trying not to draw attention, not wanting to displease her parents or cause Dad to feel disappointment.
But Kit wasn’t a little girl anymore and she couldn’t go through life needing approval. She was mature enough now to recognize that conflict was an inherent part of living, and while she didn’t enjoy tension or creating controversy, it was impossible to avoid them altogether, especially if she planned on moving forward with adoption. Not everyone in her family would have a problem with it, but there would be some who weren’t going to be happy, and there was nothing she could do about it. She wasn’t going to give up her dreams just because her dreams made someone uncomfortable.
Kit carried the cantaloupe, sliced strawberries, and graham crackers up to her mom and was tidying up the newspaper and magazine Mom had been reading earlier when her phone buzzed with an incoming text.
Stepping out of the bedroom, she checked the phone. From Jude.
Do you, or your mom, need anything?
Her heart seemed to skip and she bit her lip, overwhelmed by feelings.
Yes, she thought. Her mom needed to live and Kit needed to love. But those weren’t things she’d ask Jude for.
Thinking of Jude made her eyes burn and a lump fill her throat. She liked him, she did, but he didn’t fit with the Brennans. He wouldn’t fit in. He’d be like Brianna, always rubbing everyone the wrong way.
It’d been so hard for her to watch Brianna constantly be criticized and punished. She couldn’t bear to introduce someone like Jude to her family and watch him be shunned.
Kit forced herself to text him back.
Thank you, but we’re good. It was nice of you to ask.
J
ude had been sitting on his porch, using a rag to wipe the grease from his motorcycle off his hands, when he noticed the sunset. The sky was no longer blue but colored like one of those Jell-O parfaits his mom used to make him when he was a kid—layers of blush, peach, and red.
Those colors made him think of Kit and he sent her a text. He didn’t expect her to take up his offer, but he wanted her to know he was thinking of her. And he was.
He liked thinking about Kit. She made him strangely happy, and happy wasn’t something he normally felt.
Of course, this wouldn’t go anywhere. It couldn’t. Not with his work. But if he didn’t do what he did…if he had a different life, different career, she’d be the one for him. Not just because she had a rockin’ hot bod and long red hair he wanted to wrap around his hands, but because she was kind. Good. You could feel her goodness when you talked to her and it made him warm on the inside. Made him happy.
Jude’s phone beeped with a text. It was from Kit. He knew it, could feel it in his bones.
He took a sip from his can of beer, crumpling the can slightly, enjoying the sound of metal bending before reading the text.
Thank you, but we’re good. It was nice of you to ask.
The corner of his mouth lifted. Kit Kat Brennan. So well mannered. So very polite.
Kit would never be interested in him. She shouldn’t ever be interested in him. His life was dangerous. There was no place for her in it.
And yet…
The red and peach were fading from the sky now, leaving it the
hazy lavender gray of twilight. Next door Howard emerged from his house to stand on his front steps and survey his property and then the property next door.
Jude rubbed another spot of oil from his right hand.
Howard was looking around his yard, and then circling his car, checking for scratches or dents. No surprise there. It was his nightly ritual to come out and inspect his crappy kingdom. But tonight, instead of going back inside, he opened the car door, got behind the wheel, and started the engine up. Howard Dempsey was going out.
D
elilah was glad Howie had gone out.
She heard him tell Mama he had some kind of business meeting. Mama wasn’t happy about it, especially as he left in one of his starched dress shirts, smelling of his Tommy Hilfiger cologne.