“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.
“I still feel bad for the doctors. I could tell it was torture for them, having to try and stay positive for a young girl when her mother was defying death with every breath she took. There was one time—” Hanna surprised herself with a laugh that caught in her chest. “—she had a fever and, in chemo, that’s a do-not-pass-go, d0-not-collect-two-hundred-dollars, straight-to-the-ER thing. They asked her what she was in treatment for, and she told them she was just one big tumor and to stop asking stupid questions. The pain meds made her a little bitchy,” Hanna added. “It was only eight weeks from the fainting to her dying.”
“Hell of a ride,” Milo said. He pushed against his chest, and she wondered for not the first time if they were doomed to always be walking triggers for one another’s deepest pains.
“There’s no winning that game,” she said. “But I got time to say goodbye. I had time to have conversations no one ever wants to have. We got to go to the Grand Canyon together for a weekend and said all the things everyone is afraid to say.” A sob bubbled up through her chest, unstoppable. “Sorry,” she said.
“For… being sad about your dead mom? That shit doesn’t scare me, Hanna.”
She couldn’t look at him.
“I mean it, Arizona. I can hold it. I’ve had lots of practice.”
She ignored him, battling it back down. She’d had lots of practice in that. Maybe she’d brave that meltdown one day.
