“Sweetie, come on. You’ve been dealing with something huge all alone, but you’re not alone anymore.”
“It’s not just the baby.” She closes her eyes and a tear rolls down her cheek. “Shit, I shouldn’t cry right now. If you knew—” She stops herself and wipes her face. “You wouldn’t feel bad for me if you knew.”
A strange, ugly stone sits in my stomach, but I try to ignore it. “I don’t know what you’re going through but you can talk to me. Does it have to do with Jaxson?”
“No, it’s not him. He’s a pain in the ass but he’s not a problem, not really. He loves me too much and wants to be part of this baby’s life too much to really make me miserable, you know?”
I move closer and try to put a hand on her arm but she flinches away. I stare at her, not sure what the hell is happening, but she finally meets my gaze and that’s when I realize—it’s me, whatever she’s feeling is about me.
I lean back against the pylon. “How long have you felt this way?”
“A while,” she whispers. “Ever since Momma died.”
“Kady, what do you feel guilty about?”
She pulls her knees up to her chest. Water drips from her feet and puddles around the wooden dock as she tucks her forehead forward and curls in on herself. I want to go closer and hug her but something’s keeping me back, some realization I only half understand. When she talks, she speaks into the hollow she makes of her legs and her chest.
“Momma came home from the doctor’s that day and I knew something horrible happened. You know how you can just tell? I could feel it the second she walked into the trailer. She went right into the kitchen, poured herself a glass of wine, and drank it all back. Her face was pale white and she was shaking as she poured a second glass and I had to pry the bottle from her hands to stop her from drinking more. She was on a million different medications at the time for her cancer, do you remember all those pills?”
“She had that little white and gray box with the doses separated by day. I used to refill it every Sunday night.”
“I thought she’d kill herself drinking too much alcohol with all that stuff in her but as soon as I said it, she started sobbing. Just crying real hard. Did you ever see Momma cry like that?”
I shake my head slowly. “Not even when the boyfriends dumped her. She cried a little, but she was still smiling, like she’d always bounce back.”
“It scared me, Cora. Really scared me. Freaked me out so bad I just started crying right along with her even though I had no clue what we were crying about. Eventually, she calmed down and I got her sitting on the couch, and that’s when she told me she was terminal. That the doctors read her latest scans and found more cancer in her liver and her lungs and her pancreas, and they didn’t think she’d have much longer, months at most if they continued treatment, weeks if they didn’t. She seemed so resigned to it that I started crying all over again, and she was the one comforting me, even though she was dying.”
I try to imagine what that must’ve been like. I never saw Momma terminal—from what I was told, her treatments were going well and her doctors were optimistic, but the question of how we were going to pay was hanging over everything. The trial had come and gone and Nolan was in prison and I was working every day trying to save enough money to pay off Momma’s medical debts, only I didn’t know if we’d ever dig out way out from under the pile of cash we’d owe the hospital system.
It was a mess. It was a horrible time. I felt sick over what happened with Nolan and I was afraid our lives were all over, and one afternoon I came home to find Momma dead in her bedroom with a bullet wound in her skull, and everything came to a crashing halt.
“Why do you feel guilty about this? You never told me about any of it.” My hands are shaking and that sick pit in my guts is getting bigger and bigger.
“I couldn’t tell you. Cora, you’d never understand what I did, but you would’ve done it too if you saw her. You would’ve done it too.”
“What did you do, Kady?”
She unfurls from her curled-up position like a rose opening and dips her feet back in the water. She lifts her chin up, face toward the sun, and she looks like she’s glowing as she closes her eyes, tear streaming down her face, and takes several deep breaths like she’s steadying herself, and I want to tell her not to say anything. I want to tell her to keep her mouth shut. To keep it bottled up. Because whatever she’s about to say is going to be worse than anything I could’ve guessed, and I don’t want to hear it. Not right now.