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There may be truth in what she’s saying, but I know it’s not the full story. “Do you not want him to date?”
“It’s not that.” Azalea shifts a bit, leaving her head on my shoulder but turning her head so that she can look at my face. “My dad is the only person who’s been in my life from when I was born until now. Theonlyone. And…I’m an adult now, I don’t live with him anymore, and it’s okay for things to be different. Theyshouldbe different. But I guess I just want to know that my home with him is always here and that I can come back to it and find it the way I left it.”
“That makes sense to me.”
“It’s selfish.”
I think about my own family, trying to put myself in her shoes. I try to imagine a life where I’d never known Mom, Lilly, or any of my aunts and uncles and grandparents. I can’t even fathom it. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that Azalea would want the only roots she has to remain firmly in the ground. “Did you tell him not to date her?”
“No.”
“Then you’re putting your dad’s feelings above your own, and that’s not selfish at all.” My hand leaves her leg and goes to the side of her face. I cradle her cheek in my palm, pressing her head gently into my shoulder. She blinks up at me, those dark eyes glassy and swirling with emotion. “You’re the least selfish person I know, baby.”
Azalea reaches up to curl her hand around my wrist. “But I’ll always have you, right?” she murmurs. “That’s what you told me. After that party, when you took me home.”
My heart stutters to a stop. I wonder if she can feel it in my pulse point. “You remember that?”
“Yes.” And then, as if wanting to prove it: “You’d really give up baseball for me?”
“Yes,” I say, surprising myself with how quickly the answer comes out. There’s no hesitation, no indecision. Just the bare truth, laid out between us.
“I would never ask you to,” she tells me. “But it’s nice to know you would.”
Ask me.Those are the words I want to say.Ask me, and I won’t leave you. I’ll stay.
And I would.
But she doesn’t ask. She’s the least selfish person I know, after all.
Instead, she nestles further into me, and I recline against the headboard.
It’s the most peace I’ve felt in weeks.
Thedayspassslowlyand quickly all at once.
I wish time would move faster. I wish time would freeze.
Spring break ends, and Azalea has to go back to school. She stops by on her way out of town. We sit on my parents’ front step for a long time, leaning into each other and letting the sun warm us up.
Lilly goes back to school, too. She fights it, especially since Dad has stopped going to work, but our parents insist. Actually, it’s mostly Mom who is so insistent—mostly Mom, who is spending less time awake.
Less time talking.
Less time laughing.
Our last real conversation is on a Thursday in April. Mom mostly hangs out in her bedroom now, and I’m hanging out with her, sprawled out on my dad’s side of the bed while she watches a cooking show.
“Can you hand me my water?” she asks, throat scratchy, and I lean over to grab it from the nightstand. She pushes herself off the pillows enough to take a drink from the glass that I hold up to her mouth. “Thanks, Mavvy.”
“Yeah.”
“Can you mute the TV for a minute?”
I do as she asks, a little wary. These days when she wants to talk, it’s nearly always about something somber and serious that I’d rather not hear. Mom struggles to sit up further, and I add a couple of pillows to the stack behind her. “Thanks,” she says again, settling back and smiling at me. I force myself to smile back. “There are some things I want to say to you.”
Her words come out slow, measured, like it’s taking effort to say them—because it is. And as much as I’m not up for this, as much as I want to scream that I don’t have the capacity to handle even one more emotionally charged conversation, I won’t. Mom is running out of time to tell me what she wants to tell me, and I am running out of time to hear it.
“That’s fine, Mom,” I tell her softly. “Go ahead.”
