“Can we talk for a minute?”
She gestured to the bed, and I dropped the pineapple floatie right in the middle of the room to sit by her. She looked nervousas she wrapped her arm around me. It was as if she didn’t want any room between us when she told me what was coming next.
“Honey, we aren’t going back to Bear Lake this summer.”
Two hundred and eighty-eight tally marks doubled in the few seconds it took her to deliver that devastating sentence. My heart plummeted. I looked over at the deflated floatie and the suitcase full of summer clothes, wishing I hadn’t started packing only to face the sting of putting it all back.
“I’m sick,” she said.
From my earliest memories, my parents never sugarcoated anything with me. They always treated me like a miniature adult and thought I was mature enough to handle the tough stuff, including brutal honesty. But I wasn’t mature or ready for anything this tough. I was a small, helpless, fragile bird who needed her mom.
“My uterine cancer returned,” she continued. “It was always a possibility after I went into remission. When I started feeling some pelvic pain about a month ago, I had my doctor look into it.”
My eyes went wide as I fought the shock that came with hearing news like that, and then they shrunk down to the size of slivered almonds as tears threatened to spill over.
I thought of Miles. How devastated he was when his mom left. How much I silently pleaded that day that it wouldn’t happen to me. She was slipping away with that news no matter how much the strength of her arm around my shoulders anchored her to me.
“It’s okay to cry. Heaven knows I have.” She lifted her paint-splattered apron and blotted at her eyes.
I wasn’t sure what to say or even what to ask. But there was one thing I needed to know more than anything else.
“What are we going to do?” It came out in a strangled whisper.
She let go of my shoulders and gripped my hands between hers, forcing me to face her. “We’re going to fight. That’s what we’re going to do,” she said.
A determined look shifted the soft features of her face into hard ones, and I felt relieved. There was a plan; one where she wasn’t leaving me.
And fight was exactly what she did.
For the next three years off and on, she received chemotherapy treatments, shrinking the tumors until they were small enough to warrant a full hysterectomy. Her oncologist said it not only gave her the best chance of survival but was also the best scenario for stopping the spread too.
Both the treatment and the surgery demanded a lot of recovery time. My dad’s architectural firm permitted him to relocate his part of the business from the downtown office on the river to our guest bedroom. He began working with virtual clients full-time like he did the summer we spent in Bear Lake.
I helped where I could. On the days my mom felt good, I paid close attention to everything she did around the house. I learned how to cook and clean and figured out how to fold laundry her way. Things were rocky, but we were a team, and I was determined to fight for our family.
When we neared that third summer, I tried not to get my hopes up. The oncologist performed scans, ran blood work, and completed various tests before the wordremissionwas ever uttered to my mom. An unattainable dream came true and even then, I didn’t dare pull out that pineapple floatie.
It was my dad who knocked on my door next, ready to shoulder me through more bad news.
“Hey, kiddo, what are you up to?”
“Just finishing my poster.”
For seventh-grade graduation, our class made collages of all our favorite memories from the school year. We signed themlike yearbooks, and it gave us something special to display in our rooms for the summer when we parted ways. My dad peered over my shoulder and chuckled at the sketch of Cozy and me tripping in our one-legged race on field day.
I smirked. “We’ve never been very coordinated.”
“No, but what you lack in synchronization, you make up for in communication and determination,” he said, pointing across the board to another drawing of the two of us crossing the finish line first.
That described Cozy’s and my relationship to a tee—two competitive spirits who refused to give up when things got hard. She never left my side through everything going on with my mom, and if anything, having someone to lean on brought us even closer.
My dad cleared his throat and sat down on the edge of my bed.
“I know you felt this coming, but we aren’t going to be able to go to Bear Lake again this year. Even with Mom in remission, I still think it would be best to keep her close to her team of doctors. It’s safer than being so remote.”
I nodded. It was all I could give him. The great thing about my dad was the way he understood me. He squeezed my shoulder and left me to finish my project while I sorted through my feelings alone.
I pulled my sketchbook from my top dresser drawer and flipped to the back, adding another mark to the depressing rows and rows. It was hard to imagine another year going by. But somehow, it did, and it was a good one.
