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I wasn’t completely stupid.
But I did enjoy feeding her. That was why I started the food delivery service. Because I knew she’d go by my apartment and see the box, and then take it.
Hell, sometimes she even straight up cooked in my apartment.
I wondered how she kept getting in.
I changed the code once a day, just to see her get frustrated.
“She still texting you?”
I looked over at my brother.
“Yes,” I answered, feeling more amused than annoyed at her texts.
“What did this one say?” Tyson asked.
Every day, I couldn’t help but unblock her number to read her texts.
I knew it was sick.
I should’ve just blocked her and not cared what she sent.
But I couldn’t go cold turkey on her.
At least this way, I could have some pieces of her. Even if they were the mad pieces.
Grinning, I went back to this morning. “I’ll start at the beginning where we left off.” Inhaling deeply—or as deeply as my battered lungs allowed—I began. “This morning at seven, she sent: You’re like the end pieces of a loaf of bread. Everyone touches you, but nobody wants you.”
I grinned wickedly at that one.
Tyson burst out laughing, placing his hand over his heart. “Goddamn. That one kind of hurts a bit.”
It did. But I knew that she didn’t mean it.
“She sent it after my Sports Center piece re-aired,” I answered.
As in, the piece where I told everyone that I would be taking an indefinite amount of time off to spend with my ailing mother.
It was a lie, but still kind of true.
My mother’s breast cancer diagnosis was very real. She was worse off than I was, and it made sense that I would take the time that I needed to be with her in her final days.
And they were final.
My mom had shared with us all at family dinner that the cancer was bad. As in, almost unsurvivable, stage four, probably not going to make it out of this one, bad.
Practically all of us had moved back home to spend more time with her.
“What was next?”
I pushed my glasses back onto my face and then kept reading. “A little after that she said: I envy everyone who has never met you.”
“Harsh,” Tyson admitted.
Agreed.
“Then there was: I hope you lose weight so there’ll be less of you,” I continued.
“Well, you got the losing weight thing down,” Aracelli came into the room, her eyes on me. She walked right over to the bed, kicked her shoes off, and then crawled in between Tyson and me. “Though not a good losing weight.”
That was true.
Stress was eating away at me. Or it might be the chemo. Mostly both.
“What’s going on in here?” Cory asked as she took a seat at the couch that was on the opposite side of the room from us. “What has you all laughing?”
“Nash is reading off all the insults that Zip is sending to him via text message,” Tyson said as he snatched my phone. “Listen to this one from last night: Maybe I’m the problem. Then, the very next one it says: Never mind. That doesn’t even sound right.”
There was a lot of snickering. Even my mom, who was on the opposite end of the couch from Cory, joined in.
“What are you laughing at?” Dad came into the room, dressed and ready to go to work.
It was only him and Hoyt missing.
“Your son’s stupidity,” Mom answered as she scrolled through her phone.
After her cancer diagnosis, she’d stopped going to work. Now she was home all day with us, and it felt super weird to not see her going ninety miles an hour.
I raised a brow. “Hey! What did I do?”
“I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you,” she stated. “And honestly, your head is so far up your own ass right now that I’m not sure it’ll accomplish anything if I explain it.”
I winced. “I’m not quite sure why you’re being so mean.”
“I’m being mean because I’ve come to realize a few things in the last few days,” she sat up, dropping her phone to the couch beside us. “Would you like to hear them?”
I had a feeling I’d hear them whether I wanted to or not.
So I nodded.
Because honestly, I’d listen to anything my mother had to say at this point. Sometime soon, she’d no longer be here to give me anything at all.
“You have her location on your phone,” she started. “How many times a day do you look at it?”
In the months that we’d been together, we’d downloaded the app that allowed her to see where I was, and me to see where she was. It’d been downloaded so we didn’t have to guess where the other was at. But now, I used it almost every single hour to see where she was, and make sure she was okay.
