Page 39

Chapter 39

APRIL

T he waiting game was my least favorite on the planet. I remembered it all too well when my mom first got her cancer diagnosis. We held our breaths between doctor’s visits and test results. This felt eerily similar, but if my mom’s journey had taught me anything, being idle equaled misery. The trick was to keep moving.

When my hands were busy adjusting gears, checking tire pressure, or lubricating chains, my heart didn’t seem to hurt as much. If I could just keep going, I’d be okay.

At home, I did the same. Working myself to complete exhaustion. My fingers were covered with nicks and shallow scratches because I rushed through projects, trying to stay one step in front of my bleeding heart. I didn’t allow my mind to stop and check on the weeping organ in my chest. I kept an audiobook blasting in my eardrums at all waking hours—though I’d had to switch genres, mid-book, dropping romance for a graphic murder mystery. I needed something disturbing enough to hold my attention away from the train wreck that was my life.

It worked .

Sort of.

It worked until, finally, I’d climb into bed, loose-limbed and depleted. I’d lie there, willing sleep to have mercy and drag me under, but it never let me off that easily. Inevitably, I’d think of Gabe. The breakup, yes. The look in his eyes when he backed away from me, of course. Then there were all the painfully beautiful moments we had together—those stung.

But mostly, I cried because Gabe was afraid of love, and how could he not be when the man who was supposed to care for him had made him bleed—broken his bones in acts of rage? I ached to think of him as that scared little boy. I hated that we lived in such a cruel world, where children were broken, and cancer diagnoses existed, and moms died in car accidents.

I’d been wrong. The universe wasn’t out to get me. It was out to get everyone. We were all hanging on by a fucking thread, weren’t we?

Somewhere along the way, my pain turned to anger. I knew he was hurting, but so was I, and it didn’t have to be this way. He’d made me feel like I was different for him, but he didn’t trust me enough to let me in. It felt like rejection. It felt like I hadn’t been enough for him.

I was angry—not because we’d slept together—but because he’d held me after, made me warm meals, told me stories of butterflies. I was angry because he’d looked into my eyes like he was seeing a window into my soul. I was angry because he let me believe we were something more.

Maybe I clung to the anger because it seemed better than the hurt.

Even still, I cried every night. Then I’d wake up hollow with my aching ribs and swollen eyelids, wishing I lived in a cave halfway up a treacherous mountain so I could grieve in peace, but that’s not how life works. The world keeps spinning, no matter how off-kilter everything seems.

So, I did what everyone who is going through a mental breakdown but still needs an income to live does: I lined up the seams of my cracked heart the best I could and wrapped that shit in masking tape. It wasn’t pretty, but it would have to do.

With nearly our town’s entire triathlon community at Clay’s party, our relationship and breakup had become a glass house. Having everyone tiptoe around me should have been awkward, but I was too grateful for the space to care.

Trevor and Billie worried over me in their own way, heating up my lunches, cleaning the bicycles before they reached my workbench, and taking calls so I wouldn’t have to. Both had tried to broach the breakup, but I wasn’t ready for that conversation and always found a way to slip out of it.

All things considered, I kept my composure at the shop. I mean, everyone knew I was sad, but I could have joined Johnson under my workbench and cried myself into a tighter and tighter fetal position until I just ceased to exist. But I didn’t, and that deserved a gold star, in my opinion.

As the days passed, I stayed a little later each night at the shop, dreading those evening crying marathons. Trevor, I noticed, had been staying longer as well. He still hadn’t found a replacement to man the running portion of the shop. The stress was eating at him. It probably would have gotten to me too if the breakup had left any crumbs.

By the middle of the week, Billie was sick of it.

“Come on,” she said as I lifted the next bike onto my stand. “You are not working on another one. I allowed this staying-late bullshit earlier this week because you had all those tune-ups before Ironman, but those have been completed and picked up. The big race is in a few days. You need to focus on you. Go home.”

I looked at the time. I’d finished working on the Schwinn the night before, which meant I’d have hours of open time. The evening stretched before me like a desert—far as the eye could see.

“Just one more,” I said, tightening the clamp.

“No. Not one more. You need rest.”

“I’ll get plenty of rest,” I said, “after this one.” I plucked an Allen wrench from the wall.

“Give me the thing,” she said, hand outstretched.

I looked down at the Allen wrench. “The thing?”

“Yes.” She sniffed. “The tool.”

“Tell me what it’s called, and I’ll stop.”

“April Eloise, give me that fucking screwdriver right now!”

“Oof, the middle name is correct, but this isn’t a screwdriver,” I said, sidestepping her to get to the bike, but she caught my arm. She tried to yank it from me, I twisted, and she wrestled me into some sort of bear hug pretzel. She was surprisingly strong for someone who considered laughing at reels as her cardio. “Get off.” I huffed.

“You are being so immature,” she panted. I felt the wrench wriggle in my grasp as she got hold of it. “Let go!”

It slipped from my palm, but I’d held so tightly that Billie knocked into the wall, rattling it. A crash behind the counter made us both freeze with an oops face.

“What the hell is going on out here?” Trevor asked, emerging from the back.

“Nothing,” I said, then looked at Billie. “You okay?”

She waved off my concern, and we joined Trevor to see what had fallen off the wall. I didn’t have to round the counter to know. I looked at the place where the framed picture of my mom and me used to hang and felt a wash of guilt and loss .

Trevor went to get a broom, but I couldn’t wait. I dodged the larger shards of glass and made my way to the frame. Small bits of glass crunched under my sneakers. Careful not to cut my fingers, I turned over the frame and undid the latch to remove the picture. When I did, a folded piece of notebook paper popped free.

I blinked at it for several moments before my curiosity took over. I placed the broken frame on the counter to unfold it. The slant of the letters made my stomach swirl before I even saw the signature.

“What is it?” Billie asked.

“A note.” I swallowed. “From my mom.”

And not just any note, but a letter—to me.

My dearest April,

The number one rule to completing an Ironman is to remember your “why?” If you can’t remember why you started, you’ll never finish. You are my why for everything. Why I get out of bed in the morning, why I work so hard at the shop, why I can’t find my favorite sweater . . .

So, naturally, you are all I thought about during the Ironman, and it’s also why you are all I can think about today after my cancer diagnosis.

I never knew the number three could be so scary, but put it between stage and cancer, and it’s, well, it has me thinking about a lot.

I know I’m going to need all the strength to pull through this, so I’m remembering my why: you—my baby girl, grown into a beautiful young woman who is funny and caring and falls asleep every night with a book on her chest. I don’t know how we got here. It’s my fault for blinking, I suppose. But when I think about you and this time I’ve had being a part of your life, I don’t feel anything but lucky. Even with the cancer, April, I’m the luckiest woman in the world because I get to be your mom.

I don’t know if you’ll ever see this. Who knows, maybe I’ll make it to the other side of cancer, and you’ll find this sorting through the shop after I’ve died at a ripe old age.

Either way, I just want you to know that having you as a daughter has been my greatest joy. I’ll always love you. In this life and the next.

Look for me in the butterflies, sweet girl.

Love,

Mom

I don’t remember how I got to the couch in the shoe section. But I was thankful for Billie and Trevor guiding me there and smooshing me between them while I cried.

“Lucky.” I sobbed. “She felt lucky.” My mom—who feared curses and bad fortune—counted herself lucky when facing down cancer.

I bawled so hard my ribs felt cracked, but that was okay. Billie and Trevor held me together. They passed the letter between them, and though they didn’t weep quite as thoroughly as me, neither had a dry eye.

When my body finally turned off the leaky faucet, I felt a sudden wave of clarity for the first time in weeks. Everything seemed to be falling apart but maybe, just maybe, some things could fall into place on the way down.

“I want you to stop worrying about finding a replacement, Trevor.”

He scooted back, trying to read my expression—probably thinking I’d lost my mind. He pushed his glasses up, wiping at his eyes. “I have to find someone. You need me.”

“What I need is for you to be happy. And I get the feeling you are considering not going to San Francisco over this.”

Trevor looked away. Nail meet head.

“You better not,” Billie growled. “I’ll kick your ass if you throw away this opportunity so you can sell shoes for the rest of your life.”

“You guys are family,” he argued. “How can I just leave when you need me?”

I shrugged. “We’ll find a way, even if that means doing things differently.” If my mom could look on the bright side in light of a cancer diagnosis, then I could find a way out of this dark tunnel. One step at a time.

As Trevor considered this, Johnson waddled over to the couch. I’m sure we were quite the sight, the three of us huddled there, red-eyed and sniffling. He sat back on his haunches and eyed us with a Get it to-fucking-gether look.

“Do you think Johnson was a mean girl in his past life?” Billie asked.

And her tone had been so serious that I barked out a laugh, which surprised me. I didn’t know I was capable of that noise anymore. Billie and Trevor laughed, too, and it felt good to have that moment of levity with them—a little sunshine amidst the rain.