Page 54 of Broken Halo

“What am I doing?” I ask my baby. He jabbers and claps his hands, I think telling me to get over myself and go take all the things of Faye’s that Trig will allow.

Me: Okay, I guess. But I’m covered in dust and haven’t showered.

I see bubbles and then nothing.

Bubbles again and finally a message pops up.

Trig: Dust means you’ve worked hard. See you in thirty.

I don’t answer. I can’t. I’m afraid I’ll cancel and I really want something of Faye’s. I can’t help but bring my hand up to finger the charm at the base of my neck that Trig put there last night.

“You want to go bye-bye?”

Griffin, excited to go anywhere, claps. “Go. Go. Go!”

I stand, pick him up, and head for the stairs to do a quick diaper change. “But you have to promise to be my shield tonight. Trig is freaking me out by being nice and I don’t know what to expect. Okay?”

He giggles.

I kiss his chubby, sweet cheek. “Give your mama a fist bump.”

And Griffin seals the deal, promising to protect me from all the personalities of my first and only real love.

* * *

June 17th —

It’s official. I had my oncologist follow-up appointment today. All the things that people beg and pray and bargain to be negative are positive.

All of them.

Not only are they positive, but they’re really darn positive. To the power of four.

I had my breakdown when I got home. It was ugly and dramatic and I’m not proud of it. The good Lord knows, I’ve weathered uglier storms than this. Heck, I survived Ray and made the choices no one should have to make, let alone carry out.

Three months without treatment. My fifty-six-year-old brain checked out after that. I agreed to a treatment plan, but for the life of me, I can’t remember what it is. Probably because they found a spot on my brain.

But summer is practically here and my garden is bloomin’.

Easton will be home for a visit tomorrow and I need to get my act together. He’s miserable enough as it is, even though he doesn’t take the time to realize how he’s let that evil take over his life. I guess I have three months without treatment, or who knows how long with, to get him to move on.

I’ll tell him before he goes back to that rat-race he calls a life. This isn’t going to ruin our visit.

I pull my T-shirt up to wipe my tears when a tissue box appears in front of my face.

My eyes follow his hand and veined forearm all the way up to where his thick bicep disappears into his T-shirt that professes his love for baseball. Closing the journal where I’ve been lost in Faye’s mind for over an hour, I pluck a tissue and wipe my eyes. I need to blow my nose but I don’t want to wake Griffin who’s sleeping on my chest.

Trig settles himself into a chair across from my sofa and takes a long pull from his beer while speaking in a low voice. “There’re boxes of those. Did you know she journaled?”

I wipe my nose before returning my hand to Griffin’s back, rising and falling with tiny breaths, and gaze across the dimmed space to the man I’m failing to hate. I’m doing such a shitty job of hating him right now, it reminds me of when I was failing high school trigonometry.

When Griffin and I walked through the front door that was left unlocked for us, it was a throwback to our visits with Faye. It was always unlocked for us and we knew to walk right in. Shortly after we rekindled our friendship, she point-blank informed me I wasn’t a guest—I was family—and I’d better waltz my skinny behind into her house on my own because she most likely wouldn’t feel like stopping whatever she was doing to just walk to the front door to let me in.

Today, the door was unlocked like her ghost was lurking, so I took a chance and waltzed in like normal. Trig was in the kitchen unearthing box after box of Chinese take-out. I stopped in my tracks at the sight of him. Since his return to Texas, I’ve only seen him in a suit. Or, at the end of the day, when he’s lost the jacket and tie and his perfectly tailored dress shirts were rumpled.

But not tonight.

Tonight, he’s in a pair of jeans topped with a Dodgers T-shirt. Casual, comfortable … familiar. Seeing him like this—looking so similar to when I met him when he was barely a man and I was still a girl—is … intimate.

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