Coming Your Wayby Beach Avenue
“Did I ever tell you the story of our first Christmas together, after your mom and I were married?”
I frowned as my dad sat down at the other end of the sofa. We’d finished our makeshift Fourth of July picnic about half an hour before, and he’d been in the kitchen, helping my mom, Quinn and Carrie clean up. The red checkered picnic cloth was still spread over the coffee table; the idea of making my way outside to the backyard exhausted me, and no way in hell was I going to give in to my dad’s suggestion that he carry me there. I might have been dying by degrees, but I could still do my best not to look like a cripple in my wife’s eyes.
Yeah, I knew it was stupid and pigheaded of me. But since I was dying at the age of twenty-two, I figured I was owed a little latitude.
My father’s opening line was random, but he was shrewd and more often than not, came around to his topic by the backdoor, as my mom liked to say. So I decided to see where he was going with this.
“I don’t think so.”
He smiled. “We’d been married since February, and we were living in the same tiny one-bedroom apartment in Philadelphia that I’d moved into right after college. We’d made the decision to relocate to the suburbs and start a family, so that fall, we’d been over here, looking. We found this house right around Halloween, and they accepted our offer on Thanksgiving.”
This part I knew. I remembered my mother saying that she’d always loved how fun it was to decorate our house for the holidays, since they’d first seen it around that time of year.
“Our lease on the apartment was supposed to end December 15th, but we couldn’t close on this house until the end of January. So me being the financial wizard I am ...” He quirked an eyebrow at me and smiled wryly. “I thought we could move out of the apartment in December, and since we were going to spend Christmas with my parents anyway, we’d just go early and stay with them until the end of January, when we could get into the new house.”
“Hmmm.” I tried not to smile, but the corners of my mouth tipped up anyway. I thought of my dad’s parents and my mom, their sometimes-uneasy relationship even now, and tried to picture what it would have been like when my mother and father were newlyweds.
“Yeah,hmmmmis a pretty accurate description of how things went. By Christmas Eve, your mom was a mess, my own mother was barely speaking to me and the entire family was in turmoil.” Dad shook his head. “The day after Christmas, Mom and I moved into a hotel and lived there until we closed on this house. My genius financial idea cost us a hell of a lot of money.”
“But Mom was happy.” I rubbed a sore spot on my leg. “So it was all worth it.”
“Totally.” He grinned. “After I sulked for about a day, I decided to just call it our second honeymoon. I’ll spare you the nitty gritty details, but let’s just say ... if you’d hung in a little longer and weren’t born so dang early, you’d have come about nine months after that little unplanned vacation.”
“Thanks for that information, Dad.” I grimaced. “What’s the moral of this trip down memory lane?”
He sighed. “Quinn’s miserable, Nate. She’s exhausted and tense and on edge. Your mother ... God love her, son, and you know I do, but she’s spent twenty-two—well, nearly twenty-three years now keeping you alive. It’s not easy for her to just hand the reins over to Quinn, and it’s not fair to expect Quinn to jump into her shoes.”
I shifted a little bit. “But I don’t want Mom to take care of me. I want just a little bit of normal, okay? Just ... something the way it’s supposed to be. I just want Quinn and me to be a couple for as long as we can. If we could move somewhere and be on our own, I’d do it. But Mom would freak out. I thought being here would be a decent compromise.”
“You’re not wrong about your mother. And Nate, you and I have always been straight with each other, right? As much as you want to have what you call a normal life with Quinn for as long as you can, we have to take your mother’s feelings into consideration here. And if I’m being honest, mine, too. Neither of us wants to lose any time with you. We also know that we’re familiar with your medical needs in a way that Quinn isn’t. It wouldn’t be fair to your mom and me for you to move away from us and deny us these days with you, and it wouldn’t be fair to expect Quinn to jump in as an expert in your medications and other needs.”
“So what do you suggest?” I sagged back into the couch. “Are you saying I should send Quinn away? Or just let Mom run over her all the time? You saw what happened earlier. They were at each other’s throats. I love Mom, but you taught me that a man’s responsibility is to his wife, right?”
My father smiled. “I did. Our situation is a little different, though, than when we used to have our talks about marriage.”
“You always assumed those discussions were hypothetical, didn’t you?” I let my eyes drift shut. “Guess I fooled you.”
“Yeah, maybe.” He sounded sad. “But I did have an idea, and I ran it by Carrie this afternoon.”
“Were you thinking of Quinn and me moving in with her?” Carrie’s house was certainly big enough for us, but since it was two stories, with the bedrooms upstairs, I’d never considered us living there.
“That was my first idea, yes, but I decided pretty quickly that it wouldn’t work. At least, not her house here in Eatonboro. But you two seemed to make out well down at the shore. I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t go back down there. Quinn would be more comfortable in a house that’s familiar, for sure, and her bedroom is fairly spacious—I’m sure we could fit in the hospital bed even with her bed.”
“But what about Mom? And you?” I didn’t see how this was going to solve that problem.
“Mom could move down, too. It would be good for her, actually. And I’ll commute on the weekends. I can even probably cut down my work week a little, stay until Monday nights.”
“What about my doctors?” Being too far from the medical professionals had been one of my mom’s concerns about me being in Ocean City even for the week after our wedding.
“I haven’t checked with Dr. Randall yet, of course, but I have a hunch that he’ll be okay with this.” He shrugged. “Maybe that’s the upside of the fact that there’s not much they can do for you anymore.”
I stared at the seam on the edge of the cushion. “The last time I saw him, he said that eventually we’d have to talk about hospice. He told me it’ll be the kindest thing I can do for you and Mom, and for Quinn. Can we do that down there?”
For a long few moments, my father didn’t answer. When he did speak, his voice was heavy. “We can. Of course, nothing says you have to stay down there ... that long. If you felt that you wanted to move back to this house later on, we could arrange for transport, even if you couldn’t handle the car trip by then.”
I’d thought that I’d long ago come to grips with impending death. It had been perched on my shoulder for so many years that we should’ve been old friends. Still, talking in such definite terms gave me a little sense of panic, as if there wasn’t going to be enough time.
