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My head snaps toward my mother’s closed bedroom door.
Is he serious? Of all the times my brother decides to show up, he picks now, this very moment to storm in and try to take over.
“Why don’t you spend a few minutes with her?” I say as I press my lips to Alex’s forehead.
He looks nervous, his eyes darting to my mother’s hand in his to the bedroom door.
“Does that make you uncomfortable? To stay in here with her?” He shakes his head. “Everything will be okay.”
I stand, giving his shoulder a reassuring squeeze, completely unsure if it’s a lie.
I slip out of the room, tears still tracking down my face and find my brother and Ignacio practically nose to nose and ready to throw down. Minutes after my mother took her last breath, these two assholes are going to come to blows in the middle of the family room? Today is not the fucking day.
“Cooper?” I say, my voice coming out weak and needy.
I’ve never gotten along with him. He’s six years older and has always been self-centered. Cooper worries about number one and that’s it. Everyone owes him something, and he has the ability to snap in a flash if he doesn’t get what he wants.
My brother spins around, and for a split second I pray he’ll have a personality transplant. I want comfort and reassurance. I want him to be the big brother I always wanted, but it’s clear from the scowl on his sunken face that this particular prayer won’t be answered, the same way the ones I had for Mom weren’t. It seems God is busy with other things today.
“Is she dead?” Cold. That’s the only way to describe his tone, as if an enemy has fallen instead of his own flesh and blood.
Most people would have more compassion for someone they don’t even know than what he’s showing right now. He acted the same way to the news of Dad’s passing, so I shouldn’t be surprised.
I can only nod, movement catching my eye.
Ignacio steps around my brother and makes his way closer to me, and just the sight of him draws a gasping breath from my mouth, but I can’t do this right now. I can’t let him touch me or hug me or try to comfort me. I’d lose it. The sympathy and sorrow on his handsome face is too much as it is.
“Don’t,” I manage when he opens his arms for me, and the pain in his eyes when he drops his arms chisels away another little piece of me. At the rate I’m going, I won’t have anything left.
“You fucked my friend?” Cooper snaps as if now is the time to have the conversation about something that happened over a decade ago, while his mother’s body is in the other room.
“Enough,” Ignacio snaps.
Like a dragon slayer, he seems to grow in size as he spins to face my brother. Cooper’s eyes snap to him and I expect an all-out brawl, but there must be something on Ignacio’s face I can’t see because my brother takes a step back before looking over at me again.
“I need to call the hospice,” I mutter.
The guys stand in the middle of the room in a stare-off I’m sure will end up with another phone call, this one to the police from the way they’re both acting as I make the numerous calls required.
“They’re going to be here soon, Coop. If you wanted to see her.”
My brother’s eyes dart toward my mother’s bedroom, but he doesn’t make a move to go that direction. He can’t seem to let go of enough anger to step away from Ignacio.
“Fuck this,” he hisses before looking in my direction. “If she’s dead, then half the house is mine. I’m selling this piece of shit.”
And with that bomb, he walks out of the house, the slamming of the door behind him like a secondary explosion in my world that’s already looking like a war zone.
I can’t speak to Ignacio, and thankfully he must understand that as he steps aside when I head back to the room. Instead of letting me walk past, he runs his fingers down my forearm, clasping our pinky fingers for a second before taking a step back.
Long ago it was a promise. It said I love you, I’ll never leave you, you’re it for me.
Everything is going to be okay.
But today, it’s just another hit I have to take, another blow threatening to knock me down.
Because he doesn’t love me.
He did leave me.
He moved on.
And everything is definitely not going to be okay.
I’m numb by the time the funeral home shows up, at that point in a terrible day where exhaustion is beginning to set in, and everything has an unrealistic haze around it.
But somehow the tears are renewed when the funeral home workers explain that the hallway to my mother’s room is too narrow to get the gurney to her.
