The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [75]
Courtney says nothing.
“Well . . . does it make you feel better?”
Courtney seems puzzled. “When am I going to do it, if not right now? Did you forget? I was the kid who had cancer. For all anyone knows, it could be lurking in my blood right now, waiting to make a comeback.” She sounds perfectly sober. “I could be dying right now and no one would know. Maybe not even me.”
“Oh for God’s sake. Don’t be so dramatic.”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Courtney mocks. She goes to the sink and fills a glass with water. “Do you think I’m stupid? I know what the statistics are for getting sick again if you had a childhood cancer. When am I supposed to do anything, if not now?”
“When you grow up, that’s when! You’re going to grow up, too. All your tests were negative. Start acting like somebody with a future!”
“Huh!” Courtney clunks her glass down onto the counter and snaps her fingers. “It can happen that fast. Mrs. Lamm was fine a couple of months ago, and look at her now.”
“Mrs. Lamm’s condition has nothing to do with you!”
“Of course, it does!”
“Listen to me, Courtney.” Andrea gets up, moves toward her. “You got better. Mrs. Lamm isn’t going to.” She pictures Paisley in the recliner, eyes closed above the jutting cheekbones, uttering the small, pathetic whine of a trapped animal—a suffering animal, this is what it comes to, isn’t it? “Mrs. Lamm is going to die. You”—she jabs a finger at Courtney’s chest—“are fine. And have a good chance of staying fine if you don’t turn into a drunken, tattooed slob ruining her lungs with smoke!”
“Fine?” Courtney taunts. “Fine if I study hard? Eat my veggies? No boys. No cigarettes. No piercings, no tattoos. Fine so I can do all that when I grow up? If I grow up. If it doesn’t come back to get me for no reason like it’s got clean-living Mrs. Lamm right now!”
Andrea grabs Courtney’s tattooed arm again and leans in close. “Exactly,” she says, fury twisting through her. “If it doesn’t come back for no reason, who knows, maybe you’ll stay well for the next sixty years. Or you might get hit by a truck tomorrow. There are no guarantees. None. But that doesn’t give you the right to be a little bitch!”
She lets go of Courtney’s arm, flings her away, halfway across the kitchen.
Courtney regains her balance and stands there. She is stunned.
So is Andrea. She’s never laid an angry hand on her daughter. She didn’t think she ever would.
They stare at each other. It’s Andrea, not Courtney, who leaves the room.
Chapter 18
Paisley—Walking
I knew Eddie Logan would be out there that day. I didn’t run into him by chance.
I’d been taking those long walks in the morning for months by then. They say if you walk long enough, you can sleep without dreaming. I trudged through the deserted field behind the Honeywells’ house for an hour, sometimes more. Wildflowers grew there, but nasty stuff, too: briars and brambles, weeds as high as my knees. I kept thinking, well, I could be bit by a snake. Good riddance. All I wanted to do was sleep. When I got home, I dropped into bed and sometimes stayed there until Brynne came home from school. Dreams? Always. But the beauty was that when I woke up, for the first moment, I didn’t remember.
The last night before my miscarriage, Mason had put his hand on my belly and said, “Live and thrive, little guy.” He gave a sheepish grin. This was odd for Mason, who was rarely sheepish. He said, “Maybe this time it’ll be a boy.”
The next morning I started bleeding. It was not a boy.
It was not anything.
It’s no crime for a man to want a son. No crime for him to touch his wife’s belly and say so. But Mason was a newspaperman. He knew that making a thing public was a way to invite trouble. He knew silence could be a shield over whatever you wanted to protect. He shouldn’t have been euphoric just because I’d reached the end of my first trimester. He shouldn’t have imagined we were out of the woods.
A month after the miscarriage, locked away in my little bubble of despair, I still hadn’t told him the doctor