Page 25 of Tell Me Something

“Why’s it all still out here? I told you I’d pay for your move. We can transport these belongings back East.”

“I know and thank you, but I don’t know where I’m attending school and then where I’ll live after that. This storage facility is better than most. It’s known for its security, and my mom was adamant about that with so many valuables. Plus, I’m scared to death of something breaking in a move.”

He nodded his understanding and then took a seat on the sofa and patted the cushion beside him. “Will you tell me about your parents?”

“Don’t you need to fly to Hong Kong?”

He took my hand, pulling me gently into his lap. “I never pretend to be interested for the sake of doing so. If I ask you something, it’s because I truly want to know.”

This was a fundamental part of him. He never cared if the moment got awkward or needed some conversation filler. Instead, he was measured in what he asked and decided to talk about. He reclined slightly on the cushions and settled me between his legs, waiting for me to speak.

“My mom was born and raised Southern, daughter of a governor. My dad grew up in Northern California, but he worked in the South on my grandfather’s second-term campaign as an intern one summer. They met, fell in love, got married, and she moved out to California. He was a divorce attorney. My mother was a homemaker who involved herself in local charities and with my school. I had a good childhood: private schools, nice vacations, all of their attention, love, and support.” I paused and thought back to the night that had forever changed my life.

“Then one evening, out of the blue, my parents called me into the living room. My mother had been crying; my father was more serious than I’d ever seen him. I instantly thought I was busted for having had sex in the back seat of my boyfriend’s car. We’d done that for the first time a week earlier. I was so naïve and self-centered.”

Josh hugged me. “You were a teenager. You’re supposed to be self-centered at that age. So I take it they told you news about your father’s health?”

Sighing, I recalled the memory. “Yes. My father was a smoker in my younger years but had quit when I was in middle school. So we were all shocked when he was diagnosed with lung cancer. When he quit, we ignorantly figured all the risks disappeared.” I waited, appreciating that Josh was still intently listening.

“How long did he have?”

“Less than a year. He tried one round of chemo, but that seemed worse than the cancer. He’d hoped to watch me graduate, but unfortunately he fell a few months shy.” Josh’s arms came around me, and I swallowed past the lump in my throat. “At least he knew that I’d been accepted to Stanford. That made him proud.”

“I bet it did. And your mom?”

“After my father died, we packed up and sold the house. My mother’s father passed away that same year, and my mom went into a deep depression. I never knew my mom to smoke cigarettes, but evidently her dad had been a heavy smoker while she grew up, and it turned out she’d smoked for quite a few years in her youth. I didn’t realize then that she already knew she had the early stages of emphysema. Combination of her smoking and the secondhand smoke exposure.

“She insisted on moving down with me during college. I wasn’t thrilled with the idea, but the thought of leaving her alone was worse, so we moved down to Palo Alto and got an apartment there. At the end of my freshman year of college, my mom told me she was sick. By my junior year, she was on oxygen. A month after my graduation, she passed.”

“She attended your graduation?”

“Yes, from a wheel chair and on oxygen, but she got to see it. The last couple months while I studied for the LSAT, we composed her bucket list. We went through places she’d always wanted me to see, things that were important to her for me to know about, such as traditions, et cetera. I guess it gave her peace to know that we made plans together for the future. I don’t know, I guess it doesn’t really matter.”

“Of course it matters. I think it’s a gift to have had that time. Is her death the reason you didn’t go directly into law school?”

“Yeah, that, finances, and my little mental breakdown.” I was trying to make a joke but realized it fell flat when he stiffened. “I was only kidding.”

He kissed the back of my neck and swept my hair to the side. “Tell me about it.”

“I’d planned on attending law school, but the medical debt was high, and there were a lot of things to take care of. I wasn’t focused.”

“They didn’t have medical or life insurance?”

“My father did, but there were still sizable medical bills. It’s astounding how much cancer costs even with insurance. Selling the house helped, and although I didn’t have a lot of insight into the finances at that point, my father’s law partner told me that my mom was debt-free. With my dad’s death, our medical coverage stopped and since my mom wasn’t yet sixty-five years old and didn’t qualify for Medicare, she had no insurance. I had to sell their cars, and my mom sold a lot of her jewelry. So no law school fund. Rather than go into student loan debt, I chose to save up some money. I took the experience I had working for my father during the summers—filing, preparing documents, and helping schedule—put it on a resume, and got the job with Warren in LA.”

“Tell me about the breakdown.”

I winced, having hoped I’d steered successfully away from that bit. “It’s not something that’s easy for me to talk about. Tell me something personal that no one else knows about you, and then I will.”

Exhaling, he massaged my shoulders gently. “I had a vasectomy in the third year of my marriage.”

I hadn’t figured on him reciprocating with something so deeply personal. Yet when he didn’t elaborate, I had to ask. “Why?”

“Aside from the obvious reason that I don’t want to have children?”

“Something must have convinced you to make that decision when you did.”

He paused before changing the subject. “Were you hospitalized and treated?”