“Hey.” I tried to keep my voice light and failed.
“Hey.” She fake smiled.
I sat in the chair next to her, and took her cold hand in mine. “Nervous?”
She nodded. “A little. I’ve never had surgery before.”
Fuck you, Wayne, you selfish motherfucker.
“Truck is right outside. We can bail out the emergency exit,” I told her.
She gave me a stern look. “Stop.”
With a sigh, I reached out and brushed a hair away from her forehead. “I have a confession,” I told her.
Her eyes went wide and she nodded for me to continue.
“I wasn’t so much mad about finding out that I had Colin’s heart as I … I was jealous.” I threaded my fingers through hers. She opened her mouth to speak and I placed a finger to her lips to quiet her.
“I was jealous that this amazing woman was so perfectly loved by this dude that she’d be willing to stalk a random guy just to be closer to a tiny part of him.”
She grinned. “Stalk is a heavy word.”
“Heavily accurate,” I told her, and she laughed.
I wanted to make her laugh forever. Please let me make her laugh forever.
“Millie…” I looked her right in the eyes. “I just hope that I can love you even a fraction of what he so clearly did.”
Tears streamed down her cheeks and she nodded. “You already have.” Leaning forward, she kissed my lips, and for the first time since I was a kid I prayed to God to protect this woman. Protect my future. Give me a million more days to love her.
“The doctor was twerpy looking,” I told Gran as my ankle bopped up and down. I’d had so many coffees I felt sick to my stomach.
“He was fine,” Gran told me, looking up at me from over her needlepoint. I looked at the pattern and felt a tiny bit of my tension ease.
Happy as a fuckin’ clam, was stitched in black, and she was working on a big clam right underneath.
“You should make something for the new bar. No hipsters welcome, or something like that.”
Gran smiled; she had nerves of steel that woman. After everything she’d been through in her life, not much could shake her. So when one of the doctors who’d operated on Millie and Wayne walked in, I leapt into the air, running at him while Gran calmly set her needlepoint down and stood slowly.
“How’d it go?”
“Your father—”
“I don’t care about him, tell me about Millie first.” Was this guy high? The first thing you should say when you walked out is that everything went fine. Unless it wasn’t fine and then I wanted to fucking know about it. Now.
He frowned. “She’s fine. He’s fine. The surgery went great. Millie has a healthy liver and we were able to get enough of the right lobe to ensure your father has many more years left.”
I grabbed my chest, feeling the tension dissipate. “You need to start with that next time, man.”
He smiled. “They’re both in recovery. Once they wake, you can see them.”
Gran clasped her hands in prayer. “Thank you.”
“Yeah, thanks.” I was suddenly overcome with emotion. The doctor turned to leave and the strongest urge to cry welled up inside of me. What the hell was wrong with me? I was going to have to turn in my man card soon. Millie turned me into a pussy.
“You okay?” Gran rubbed my back in small circles.
I cleared my throat. “Was this how it was for you when I was in surgery after the accident? This overwhelming sense of relief after hours of sitting on pins and needles.”
Gran nodded. “Except I had to grieve your sister’s death at the same time I hoped you would live. It was a shitshow.”
Poor Gran. Just being here brought back so many awful memories of that time. I was in the hospital so long, without Jenna, it was depressing as hell. I hated this place.
My voice was low and dark: “You ever wish Wayne had died instead of Jenna?”
Gran pinned me with a glare. “What kind of devil question is that?”
I grinned at her reference to a “devil question.” “I mean if you had to choose.”
“Stop it. You’ve been stuck in the anger phase of grief for too long, son. Time to move on to the next one.”
Maybe she was right, maybe it was time I let Wayne off the hook. Not that I could ever truly forgive and forget what he’d done over the course of my life, but holding in the anger wasn’t going to add years to my life I was sure.
My voice was soft: “I just … I want someone to be hard on him. To make him see what his drinking does.”
Gran shook her head. “There’s nothing you could do that would be harder on him than he is on himself. Why do you think he drinks?”
I frowned, uncomfortable with how real this conversation had become, and suddenly grateful we were the only ones in the room.
“I know, because he loved Mom, and she died, and he can’t live without her—”
“Wrong,” Gran urged. “That’s why he started, but he keeps doing it for another reason.”
Gran tried to get me to go to family counseling with him once. I declined. Then again she invited me to Al-anon, Alcoholics Anonymous for families. Another big fat decline from me. I wasn’t the one who needed therapy.
I appeased the woman: “Why?”
She reached out and brushed a lock of hair away from my eye. “Shame, baby. He’s so ashamed of what he is and what he’s done.”
That feeling was back, the one that made my throat go tight and eyes feel moist. I never thought Wayne was
