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I bit my lip to keep from laughing as Mom gasped and Aunt Nita dipped her head.
“Mom!” My mother glared at her mother-in-law.
“Okay, we’re not going to talk about my sex life,” I said, quickly changing the subject. I’d blurted out that little tidbit about our sex life this morning when I’d first gotten here; leave it to Grandma G not to miss a thing. “I’m really sorry I waited until the eleventh hour to cancel the wedding, but it wasn’t until I heard him talking to his friend that I realized all those red flags had been my subconscious warning me. He doesn’t love me, not really, and I don’t love him either. It would have been a disaster. I did us all a favor.”
“Your father is very upset,” Mom said, lifting her coffee cup and meeting my gaze over the rim. “You’re going to have to talk to him.”
“I know.”
“It would go a long way to making him happy if you volunteered for the kids’ camp coming up,” she said.
“I’ve got a lot to do at the lab,” I protested. He’d asked me every year if I would help him coach at the hockey camp for underprivileged kids that he sponsored, and I’d always made excuses.
Mom gave me a look. “Your non-wedding cost us tens of thousands of dollars. I think the least you could do is help your father with the camp. He and different guys from the team deal with the older kids, but he needs help with the younger ones, especially the girls. You know how gruff he is and the little ones are scared of him.”
I thought about it for a minute and realized it might not just help mend fences with my dad but also get me out of the lab once in a while. I spent far too much time there, and though I loved what I was working on, my body was starting to protest all the time I spent hunched over a microscope or in front of my computer. Exercise combined with keeping Dad off my back was a win-win deal.
Not to mention, I loved hockey.
I’d played when I was younger, until my love for science had overshadowed everything else. It might be fun to get back out on the ice. And I loved kids, so that part wouldn’t be a problem.
First thing tomorrow, I’d talk to my dad.
Maybe then things could go back to some semblance of normal.
CHAPTERTHREE
Boone
I’d never beena person who prayed, but as the phone rang, I closed my eyes and asked God to heal Andy. To give him the strength he needed to get through the fight of his life.
“Hey, man,” my brother said when he answered my call.
“Hey. You answered. That’s a good sign.”
His laugh was gruff, without a note of amusement. “I’m too fucking sick to even sleep. This round kicked my ass.”
Why? I’d asked the universe that question hundreds of times in the past three months. Why did my younger brother have to battle colon cancer when he’d just married the love of his life two years ago? When he’d become a father one year ago? It was so damn unfair.
“Worse than the time we swiped Dad’s huge bottle of whiskey and drank the whole thing?” I asked.
Andy groaned. “Shit, man, I thought I was going to die that day.”
I’d puked into a football helmet from my bed, too sick to even make it to the bathroom. I’d been seventeen and Andy had been fifteen. It had taken me years to be able to even look at whiskey without feeling ill.
“Dad was so fucking pissed.” I smiled at the memory. “You told him the hangover was punishment enough.”
“Yeah, he didn’t agree.”
It was brutal being so far away from my brother when he was going through hell. I could hear the exhaustion in his tone. My agent was looking into the possibility of a trade to Nashville, my hometown, so I could be closer to Andy, but each day that passed felt like forever.
“How’s Carrie doing?” I asked.
Andy sighed into the phone. “She’s doing it all. I can’t do shit. She’s up at night with Mason, then up early to feed him breakfast and get him to day care. When she gets home from work, she has to take care of me and him and the house.”
For my brother, the hardest part of having cancer was being helpless. He’d been a broad-shouldered construction worker. A CrossFitter. An avid hunter. An active father. And now he weighed a buck sixty, his body suffering the effects of both cancer and his treatment.
When I got back to Nashville, I’d be able to help take some of the load off of Carrie. I wanted to be there for her and my nephew as much as I wanted to be there for my brother.
