And yet, I still add the last point...
6) Let love be a possibility.
Falling in love is on this list, not as a requirement, but as a suggestion, to not let one cowardly man ruin this experience for us. Because while love just burnt me with the worst pain I've ever felt, there were good times. There had to have been. So, while love and dating is not on my radar right now with the battle I'm about to fight looming, I still want to keep hopeful that I will fall in love again. I will not cut my nose off to spite my face.
I will fall in love, maybe not before you read this, but I will fall in love again one day. He will be a reliable, dependable man. Someone who stays through the good, but especially through the bad. A man who chooses me when it's hard, who puts a steady hand at my back and doesn't flinch when life is not pretty. Who won't flinch when he sees my scars, who will call me beautiful even when I'm not feeling like I am. Someone who thinks kindness is sexy and gentleness is rebellion. Someone who accepts me as I am, in whatever state I may be in. That will be my future partner.
When you read this next year, I hope you're cancer-free,confident, and happy. I hope the apartment feels like yours in every corner. I hope the bookshelf is heavier and your heart is lighter. I hope your closet is stuffed with new cute clothes and your drawer has many, many new, cute hats to cover up our bald head. I hope there are new names in your phone who feel like family. I hope I can give that to you. You deserve it.
And...
I hope there's a man in the future who proves that love is a verb.
I will fall apart tonight, I will get up and plan tomorrow. Then I will do both as many times as it takes, until we have won.
We are going to be okay.
Love,
Sophie
Chapter Four
Callum
Rivers & Rhodeshas been in business for ten years now, and it still feels like we just opened yesterday. It's also the measurement of how long my dad has been gone, which also feels like it happened yesterday. I was only twenty-two when my mom called me in the middle of the night and told me he had a heart attack.
My eyes drift over to my mom, Maeve Rhodes, sitting in her oddities corner, shuffling her tarot cards. People always compliment that she's a dead ringer for Stevie Nicks in herBelladonnaera, which is the highest compliment you can pay her.
Long, curly blonde hair, flowy dresses, and rings adorning almost every finger. She has this way about her where she seems to float from place to place.
I remember walking downstairs when I was a kid and seeing my dad just gazing at her as she hummed to whatever record she had on while working her mortar and pestle. He looked at her like she was some mystical, otherworldly being, and he was lucky enough to be in her presence.
I watch her now. Her brown eyes—the same shade as mine—are staring into space while her hands expertly move. Her mouth suddenly quirks, and she mouths something I can't catch, but I know it isn't meant for me anyway.
She talks to my dad like he's still here, and I can almost see it now—my rough-and-tumble father with his salt-and-pepper hair and thick beard, sitting next to my mom as she rambleson about moon phases and rising signs while he listens to every word like it’s gospel.
People sometimes call my mom odd, which never bothers her because,
"Sweetest heart, I am odd. I like being odd."
But my dad hated anyone who talked badly about his Maeve. He would glare and snarl at anyone who ever sneered at her. William Rhodes loved and cherished my mom every day he knew her—bringing a bouquet of wildflowers he picked while out on a jobsite, stopping at every roadside attraction she wanted to see on our family road trips without complaint, dancing with her at every wedding we went to because she wanted to dance with her husband and he would lasso the moon if she asked.
It wasn't just him though—she showed up for him, too, every day—making him her special peppermint lotion and rubbing his tired hands after a long day of construction, scratching his scalp with her long nails as he laid his head in her lap while we watched television, waking up stupid early to make him breakfast and lunch because he was looking at a two-hour drive out and a two-hour drive back from jobsites.
The biggest instance I can remember was her taking over the organization of the funeral and lawyer stuff after my dad's sister died suddenly from a blood disease. I was eight, and I can remember how that wrecked him. He was grieving and would sometimes snap, lashing out at the world, and Mom was usually the one who took the brunt of that month of pure pain.
Mom would just gently correct and redirect his anger. He wasn't mad at her, never at her; he was furious at the universe for taking his only family. My mom would fold him into her embrace, rocking and humming to him. My strong-as-steel dad cried like a baby in her arms, allowing himself to be vulnerable in a way I had never seen before.
That moment of witnessing true safety and vulnerability isingrained in my brain forever.
Even after their few-and-far-between fights—which they would try to never do in front of me—they would gravitate back toward each other after cooling down and both apologizing with a hug and a kiss and anI love you forever.
My dad moved away from construction into private contracting when I got older and was able to help more. I remember asking him, when I was seventeen, and we were driving to a worksite, about a fight they'd had the night before. I asked him why he apologized to Mom again that morning when I thought he had a good point from what I heard.
???
He sighed, pulled over to the side of the road, and turned to meet my eyes, his face stone-cold serious. More serious than I had ever seen before.
