“Good morning,” she replied. “Wait… didn’t you have a thing you had to go to last night?”

“I cancelled it earlier on.”

“Oh.” She fidgeted a little with the belt loop of her jeans. “Did you know yesterday afternoon?”

“Not really. You fell asleep in the car on the way back from the airport and your dad told me to cancel it but wouldn’t tell me why, only that I would be needed or something. And then it just came together… before dinner…”

“When you saw her.”

I hesitated before answering. “Yeah.” More silence followed.

“I was hoping it was just a really bad dream… I’d wake up and everything would be okay.”

“Hey… wanna go for a drive?” I suggested, not liking where this conversation was headed.

“What time is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can we change first?” she asked.

“Alright.” A few minutes later, after we had put on something more comfortable, we hopped into the car. I didn’t even think before I began to drive, but it seemed like my unconscious thought the beach was a good place, since that’s the direction I was headed in.

“Is the beach okay?” I asked as I rolled down the window and lit up a cigarette. I looked over at her; she was frowning. I threw my cigarette out the window. “Sorry.”

“Yeah.” I didn’t know whether she was referring to my apology or to the beach. The rest of the ride was spent in silence. It was still dark when we arrived but we knew exactly where to go.

“At this time last year… we were in the exact same place,” Spencer pointed out, with a slight giggle. It felt like it had been forever since she had expressed any sort of happiness, and I was glad for even that tiny display.

“Total déjà vu.”

“Remember the first time we came here?”

“Of course. You told me you didn’t want to be gay anymore,” I reminded her.

“Yeah… well, I take that back,” she said with a smile. She held my hand, intertwining our fingers as she leaned her head on my shoulder; I responded by wrapping my arm around her waist, pulling her towards me. “Have you ever lost anybody close to you before?”

“I don’t really think I had anyone close to me I could lose,” I admitted. “But I had an aunt die once when I was maybe, like, five.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It didn’t really seem like a big deal. I was so young… I barely knew her,” I explained. “What about you.”

“My grandpa died when I was nine,” she told me.

“Sorry.”

“He had lung cancer from smoking. So… I guess he had it coming.” I expected her to begin talking about my smoking habits but she didn’t. In fact, she didn’t say anything. It was a half-finished idea, but I took this opportunity to get something out.

“Spence, you’re acting like your mom’s dead… she’s not.”

“I know,” she answered quietly.

“Cancer isn’t, like, an automatic ticket to your grave. So many people recover from it.”

“I know.” I was fresh out of supportive words, so I let silence take its hold.

—————————————————————————-

My head was spinning; it was like an information overload. It wasn’t that I had gotten so much information, it was that the information had been so important, so significant, that it consumed me. My mother has cancer. My mother has cancer. My mother has cancer.

On top of all the obvious hurt one has to deal with when the prospect of losing a parent is faced, is the fact that before tonight, we hadn’t spoken in about seven months. Those are seven months I wasted, seven months I’ll never be able to get back. Sure, we had had disagreements, but now I was feeling painfully guilty for avoiding her calls, or for never calling back. How could I have acted so childish?

Now, we were at the part where there wasn’t much else to talk about. It was the awkward phase, waiting for her treatment to begin so we could see how things might turn out. Until then, all we could do was wait.