Page 8 of Tell Me I'm Enough

She smiles up at me and puts her hand in mine. “My little gentleman. Keep that pure heart of yours, okay?”

I nod and pull her up out of the car.

We walk in together, and I don’t want to let her hand go. I sit her down in her huge loveseat next to her bookshelves in the main living room so she’s comfortable. When she squeezes my hand, I can feel the twitch in her palm. I hate it because it reminds me that her body isn’t working right anymore.

Dad comes back in and sets his keys down on the kitchen island. They make a loud clink on the marble top, making us both look over at him.

“I’m going upstairs to my office for a while,” he says flatly. “Order something for dinner.”

I see my mom’s face scrunch up a little. “We just found out I’m dying, Scott. Can’t you just stay with us for a little?”

I don’t get why she begs for him to be around us sometimes.

“Don’t be dramatic.” He picks up his briefcase from the floor. “You’re not dying today.”

Sometimes I wish I was big enough to hit him.

My mom doesn’t say anything else to him as he walks past us. His strong cologne stings my nose, and I hate it. I hate everything about him right now.

I don’t understand how someone as nice as my mom married someone as mean as him. I don’t understand why she even stays with him. I wish she would leave and it just be her and me.

I don’t think I could everreallybe mad at my mom. But sometimes…sometimes I hate that she stays here.

“Come here, baby,” she tells me when he leaves the room.

I crawl into her lap, even though I’m getting a little too big to still fit there. She wraps an arm around me and scoots me closer, kissing the top of my head.

“Ask me any of the questions you have, Mase,” she says quietly, with her head against mine. “I don’t want you to be scared of this.”

“What does it feel like? Right now. Inside you.”

She thinks about it for a moment.

“Like…like someone turned down the volume on my muscles,” she says.

“Will it hurt?” My voice cracks a little when I ask that, and it makes me feel weak because my dad would say I shouldn’t be so emotional as a boy.

“Sometimes,” she answers. “But they’ll have medicine for that. And I’m tougher than I look.”

“You don’t look tough,” I say, and she laughs.

“Will you die before my next birthday?” I don’t even mean to ask that one, but I can’t take it back now.

She presses her lips to my hair. “I don’t know. Probably not. Hopefully, I’ll be here for a lot of birthdays. Maybe I won’t. We don’t really get a real timeline here. We just get the day we’re in.”

“That’s not enough.”

“I know,” she whispers.

“Who’s gonna take me to practice?” I ask as my throat starts to hurt because I’m trying to force myself not to cry. “Who’s gonna cheer for me?”

She pulls back to look at me. Her eyes are shiny, which tells me she’s holding back tears, too.

“Me,” she says. “As long as I can, me. And when I can’t, I’ll find a way to be there anyway. You’ll hear me. You’ll feel me. In your bones when you swing a bat really hard. In the way your heart beats fast when you run a touchdown. In the stupid songs we always sing in the car, that you’ll hear and think about me. I’m not going anywhere, even when I have to leave.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“It will later,” she promises, and that makes me mad because I don’t want later. I wantnowto last forever. I want to rewind time and never move forward if forward means her not being here.