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Romeo whined and put his front paws up on the bed, then stuck his cold nose against his mother’s cheek. She smiled and turned her face to him. “Come here, baby.”
The dog leaped up onto the bed.
“Romeo, what did I just tell you?” Jax reminded him.
The dog gave him a look that he could swear said, She does love me more than you, and I am prettier than you. So there.
“It’s all right,” his mother said, the words coming slowly, her breathing labored. “…been at this for a long time. He knows…to be careful. Come right up here beside me, baby.”
Her fifty-five-pound baby crept up very slowly, feeling his way, until he was as close to her as he could get, pressed against her side, all stretched out on the bed, his head on her right arm, his nose against her cheek. He whimpered softly.
“Yes. That’s my good boy.” His mother leaned her head against the dog’s and gave a contented sigh, then turned back to Jax. “Thank you for bringing him.”
“You know I’d do anything for you,” he said and worried he might be the one to start to cry.
“Yes, I know.”
“Sorry about bringing you here.”
“It’s fine…. Doesn’t hurt much now. The medication is…They keep the really good stuff here. I needed it.”
“If you want, we’ll take you back home.” And somehow they’d find the strength to see this through to the end. If she could do it, so could the rest of them.
“No…. Better this way,” she said, lightly caressing the dog who’d been her pride and joy for the last year and a half. Romeo had flunked out of K-9 school and Jax had brought him to his mother after someone had broken into old Mrs. Watkins’s house, three blocks down from his mother’s place. Romeo was supposed to protect her, although if anyone ever broke in, the worthless dog would probably try to charm them to death.
Romeo was practically purring now. Female attention of any kind did that to him. He was the most ridiculous excuse for a dog Jax had ever seen.
“Don’t worry,” his mother said. “Won’t be long now.”
Jax stiffened. How did she know that? How could she sound so calm about it? How could he want so badly to get up and run away? She was his mother, and she was the one who was dying. If she could handle it with such dignity and grace, surely he could find a fraction of her courage and strength.
“Did you run the girls off?” she asked, about to drift off. It didn’t take long to wear her out these days.
Jax nodded. “I told them you didn’t want anyone but your two favorite boys tonight.”
“Good. Done all they can. I know that. Make sure they do, too.”
“I will.”
She lifted her right hand off the blanket, a sign that he knew meant she wanted him to hold it. He did, wrapping both of his around hers, which was like ice. He thought it got colder every day.
“I know you’ll take good care of them,” she said. “You always have.”
“No, you have. You’ve taken care of all of us.”
He’d done what he could after his father died. Jax had been eleven, the girls eight, five and almost two. His mother hadn’t had a paying job since before Jax was born. Raising four kids, his parents hadn’t had any real savings to fall back on. Just living had taken everything his father made and then some. He’d moonlighted from his job as a policeman by working security at a furniture warehouse, and had been shot and killed after stopping late one night at a convenience store on his way home from his second job, killed by a stupid kid trying to clean out the till.
Just like that. Boom. No more dad.
Jax still remembered the way he’d screamed when they’d told him. Just for a minute. Then he’d pulled himself together for his sisters, who’d come running into the room to see what was wrong.
Life had changed in an instant.
It was like that.
You never knew when someone was going to snatch something you loved away from you, a lesson he’d learned young and taken to heart.
He really didn’t need to go over this ground again, and neither did his sisters, and yet, it seemed, that’s exactly what they were doing.
“Jax?” his mother said maybe twenty minutes later. She did that. Just drifted off without warning, scaring him every time she did it now. Because one time, it would happen and she wouldn’t wake up again.
“We’re right here,” he said, Romeo on one side, him on the other.
“I just wanted you to know…I’m not scared.”
Jax didn’t see how that could possibly be. She was dying. But then, she was a religious woman. He wasn’t a religious man, something she simply didn’t understand, although she didn’t pester him about it, either. She had complete faith that he’d come to his senses one day, as she put it.
“I’m glad you’re not scared,” he said, carefully skating around the whole religion thing. He wasn’t lying. He was grateful. He wasn’t sure he could have handled her being scared and facing something he couldn’t stop or change in any way. Anything that brought her comfort right now was fine with him.
She closed her eyes and smiled dreamily. “Guess who I saw last night?”
“Who?” She’d had all kinds of people dropping by.
“Your father.”
Jax stiffened. He doubted his dad had dropped by, since he’d been dead for nineteen years.
“He hasn’t been far away today,” his mother said as easily as she might have told him her cousin Ruth dropped by.
Okay. She was on a whole lot of morphine. The doctors had warned that it did funny things to people, that people said odd things and believed they saw odd things, too. The doctors had said not to be alarmed by it.
Sure. Jax could do that. He was not alarmed.
“So nice to see him,” she said. “He looked so good. Like always. In his day, he was even prettier than you and Romeo.”
“Oh,” Jax said. What else could he say?
“He’s waiting for me.” She smiled at that.
Jax gave a little choking sound, couldn’t stop it, and he really, really wanted to get up and run away. But obviously, it made her feel better to think his dad was there, waiting. Fine. She could see all the dead relatives she wanted if it made her feel better.
“But I’ll still be with you,” she said. “Always be with you. And the girls.”
“I know, Mom.”
“No, you don’t. But…that’s all right. You don’t have to believe for it to happen, Jax.”
“For what to happen?”
“For me to help you.”
“Mom—”
“Girls will lean on you…you’ll let them. But who’ll take care of you? Have to be me.”
He brought her hand to his lips and kissed it. “Whatever you say, Mom.”
The dog started to make this pathetic, whining, crying sound that drove Jax absolutely crazy.
Take it like a man, Romeo, Jax wanted to say. He hadn’t cried in years. Probably not since his father died.
“Want you to know…no regrets,” she said. “Except not more time…with you and the girls. With my grandchildren. I wanted a dozen. But even that…doesn’t sting the way it used to. No regrets…important to be able to say when you’re where I am. I want you to be able to say it, too. No regrets.”
“I’ll say it now,” he claimed. “I don’t have any.”
He lived his life exactly the way he wanted, and it suited him just fine.
“You don’t even know,” his mother said.
“Know what?”
“What’s really important. You need to make some changes, Jax. It’s time.”
“What do you want me to do?” he asked, because he’d promise her anything and he hated so much to think that she was disappointed in him in any way.
“Believe.”
“Believe in what?”
“Love.”
“I love you,” he said. “I love Kimmie and Kathie and Katie.”
“You’ll get it right. In time,” she said, moving from one subject to another, as she tended to do of late. “I know you will.”
“Get what right?”
“Try not to miss me too much. And don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”
No, she wouldn’t. She’d be gone. He didn’t care what she believed, what she thought she’d seen. There was nothing else. She’d be nothing.
“One more thing,” she whispered, her lips barely moving, the words slurring together. “One more favor.”
“Anything,” he said.
“Left you a job to take care of. In my will.”
“Okay. I will. Promise.”
“You know? Doesn’t really hurt anymore,” she said, and for a moment it was as if someone had taken the weight of the world off her emaciated body, eased all the stress lines on her face and put some color back into her cheeks. “Doesn’t hurt at all.”
“Good.” He sure didn’t want her to hurt.
“Billy,” she said, the faintest of smiles on her face.
That was his father’s name.
It was the last word she said.
She died with a smile on her face and his dead father’s name on her lips, Jax’s hand in one of hers, and the other buried in the dog’s fur.
Jax froze for a moment, staring at the quilt over her chest, willing it to rise and fall as she took more air into her lungs. But nothing happened. There was no more of the wheezing, labored sound of her struggling for one more breath, that hideous, hideous sound.
Romeo seemed to know what had happened. He looked at Jax, as if to say, Do something!
“I can’t,” Jax said. “I already did too much bringing her here, and she signed all the papers weeks ago.”
No one was coming to try to make her breathe again or get her heart going. Her choice, and he’d accepted it. No one would do anything.
Romeo whimpered pitifully. He licked her face frantically for a moment, until Jax got up and pulled him off. Romeo growled and showed his teeth. Jax swore and said, “She’s gone. Let her be.”
He thought for a minute, the two of them might go at it, right there in his mother’s room, and he wouldn’t have minded that. He was up for a good brawl right now. But all the fight went out of the dog. It was like his whole face just fell. He curled back up next to Jax’s mom, his snout laid over her chest, and started whimpering again. Jax sat back down in his chair and buried his face against her other shoulder, because he still needed to touch her, to not let go yet.
A nurse came in sometime later to check on her, halted in the doorway at the sight of him and the dog leaning over her.
“Go away,” Jax said, glancing at her briefly, and then pressing his face against his mother’s shoulder again.
“I…Is she gone?”
“Just go away,” Jax yelled.
Another nurse came in twenty minutes later, asking if she could do anything, if he’d like her to call anyone.
“Just go away,” Jax said again.
The girls would be mad that he hadn’t called, but what was the point? It was the middle of the night, and none of them had slept in days, and he’d screwed up and brought his mother here and sent the girls home.
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” he said to no one but the dog.
Romeo whined, as if he agreed for once with something Jax said.
“And it wasn’t supposed to happen yet,” he yelled.
Romeo frowned, then laid his head back down on Jax’s mother’s chest, the two of them in complete accord. Neither one of them wanted to do anything but sit here and hang on to her and pretend she wasn’t gone.
Chapter Two
Jax and the dog stayed until morning came and with it Jax’s three sisters. Katie, the oldest, was twenty-seven, part owner of her own mortgage-finance company and a junior real estate mogul. She wore crisp, no-nonsense power suits with matching pumps, never a hair out of place, and she arrived issuing orders as usual.
