Just like that. Boom. No more dad.
Jax still remembered the way he’d screamed when they’d told him. Just for a minute. Then he’d pulled himself together for his sisters, who’d come running into the room to see what was wrong.
Life had changed in an instant.
It was like that.
You never knew when someone was going to snatch something you loved away from you, a lesson he’d learned young and taken to heart.
He really didn’t need to go over this ground again, and neither did his sisters, and yet, it seemed, that’s exactly what they were doing.
“Jax?” his mother said maybe twenty minutes later. She did that. Just drifted off without warning, scaring him every time she did it now. Because one time, it would happen and she wouldn’t wake up again.
“We’re right here,” he said, Romeo on one side, him on the other.
“I just wanted you to know…I’m not scared.”
Jax didn’t see how that could possibly be. She was dying. But then, she was a religious woman. He wasn’t a religious man, something she simply didn’t understand, although she didn’t pester him about it, either. She had complete faith that he’d come to his senses one day, as she put it.
“I’m glad you’re not scared,” he said, carefully skating around the whole religion thing. He wasn’t lying. He was grateful. He wasn’t sure he could have handled her being scared and facing something he couldn’t stop or change in any way. Anything that brought her comfort right now was fine with him.
She closed her eyes and smiled dreamily. “Guess who I saw last night?”
“Who?” She’d had all kinds of people dropping by.
“Your father.”
Jax stiffened. He doubted his dad had dropped by, since he’d been dead for nineteen years.
“He hasn’t been far away today,” his mother said as easily as she might have told him her cousin Ruth dropped by.
Okay. She was on a whole lot of morphine. The doctors had warned that it did funny things to people, that people said odd things and believed they saw odd things, too. The doctors had said not to be alarmed by it.
Sure. Jax could do that. He was not alarmed.
“So nice to see him,” she said. “He looked so good. Like always. In his day, he was even prettier than you and Romeo.”
“Oh,” Jax said. What else could he say?
“He’s waiting for me.” She smiled at that.
Jax gave a little choking sound, couldn’t stop it, and he really, really wanted to get up and run away. But obviously, it made her feel better to think his dad was there, waiting. Fine. She could see all the dead relatives she wanted if it made her feel better.
“But I’ll still be with you,” she said. “Always be with you. And the girls.”
“I know, Mom.”
“No, you don’t. But…that’s all right. You don’t have to believe for it to happen, Jax.”
“For what to happen?”
“For me to help you.”
“Mom—”
“Girls will lean on you…you’ll let them. But who’ll take care of you? Have to be me.”
He brought her hand to his lips and kissed it. “Whatever you say, Mom.”
The dog started to make this pathetic, whining, crying sound that drove Jax absolutely crazy.
Take it like a man, Romeo, Jax wanted to say. He hadn’t cried in years. Probably not since his father died.
“Want you to know…no regrets,” she said. “Except not more time…with you and the girls. With my grandchildren. I wanted a dozen. But even that…doesn’t sting the way it used to. No regrets…important to be able to say when you’re where I am. I want you to be able to say it, too. No regrets.”
“I’ll say it now,” he claimed. “I don’t have any.”
He lived his life exactly the way he wanted, and it suited him just fine.
“You don’t even know,” his mother said.
“Know what?”
“What’s really important. You need to make some changes, Jax. It’s time.”
“What do you want me to do?” he asked, because he’d promise her anything and he hated so much to think that she was disappointed in him in any way.
“Believe.”
“Believe in what?”
“Love.”
“I love you,” he said. “I love Kimmie and Kathie and Katie.”
“You’ll get it right. In time,” she said, moving from one subject to another, as she tended to do of late. “I know you will.”
“Get what right?”
“Try not to miss me too much. And don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”
No, she wouldn’t. She’d be gone. He didn’t care what she believed, what she thought she’d seen. There was nothing else. She’d be nothing.
“One more thing,” she whispered, her lips barely moving, the words slurring together. “One more favor.”
“Anything,” he said.
“Left you a job to take care of. In my will.”
“Okay. I will. Promise.”
“You know? Doesn’t really hurt anymore,” she said, and for a moment it was as if someone had taken the weight of the world off her emaciated body, eased all the stress lines on her face and put some color back into her cheeks. “Doesn’t hurt at all.”
“Good.” He sure didn’t want her to hurt.
“Billy,” she said, the faintest of smiles on her face.
That was his father’s name.
It was the last word she said.
She died with a smile on her face and his dead father’s name on her lips, Jax’s hand in one of hers, and the other buried in the dog’s fur.
Jax froze for a moment, staring at the quilt over her chest, willing it to rise and fall as she took more air into her lungs. But nothing happened. There was no more of the wheezing, labored sound of her struggling for one more breath, that hideous, hideous sound.
Romeo seemed to know what had happened. He looked at Jax, as if to say, Do something!
“I can’t,” Jax said. “I already did too much bringing her here, and she signed all the papers weeks ago.”
No one was coming to try to make her breathe again or get her heart going. Her choice, and he’d accepted it. No one would do anything.
Romeo whimpered pitifully. He licked her face frantically for a moment, until Jax got up and pulled him off. Romeo growled and showed his teeth. Jax swore and said, “She’s gone. Let her be.”
He thought for a minute, the two of them might go at it, right there in his mother’s room, and he wouldn’t have minded that. He was up for a good brawl right now. But all the fight went out of the dog. It was like his whole face just fell. He curled back up next to Jax’s mom, his snout laid