Page 1 of Fight Or Flight

Brooklyn

“Hitting a dead-end doesn’t mean you’ve come to your end, it just means you need to turn around and take a different detour, baby.”

Those are the words my mom whispered to me right after she broke the news that she was sick, and she muttered those exact words this morning as she peeled away from the curb of our Connecticut home. Four months ago, my mom was sure cancer was just a bump in the road. She thought she could fight it, that she could beat it and live. Watch me graduate from high school and go to college. She thought she would be around to walk me down the aisle and rock my babies in her arms, but she was wrong.

She never even stood a chance. Her cancer is inoperable and at her last oncology visit, the doctor told her she had only weeks to live.

Weeks.

Cancer isn’t a detour. It’s not even a dead-end.

It’s a sinkhole and soon it will swallow my mom whole and leave me an orphan. But my mom…she’s still smiling and holding onto a hope that doesn’t exist. It’s the very reason we’re in New York—a trip we were supposed to take when I graduated high school. We planned to shop on Fifth Avenue and take in a Broadway show. Maybe go to Times Square and possibly a tour of the Empire State Building. Mom loves Italian food, so we’d definitely have to fit in a pitstop to Little Italy too.

But we won’t be doing any of those things on this trip. We’re not even visiting Manhattan. Instead, we’re in some shithole place called Staten Island. Google says it’s the borough of parks and the former home of the Great Kills landfill. It’s also where my mom thinks she’s going to find my biological father, Eric Nicholson, a man who wanted no part of me.

The thing is, I’m a minor and when my mom dies, there’s no one to take care of me. My mom’s parents died a couple of years after I was born, and she doesn’t have any other relatives. My only shot is my sperm donor of a father. If he doesn’t take me in until I turn eighteen, child services will, and I don’t know which is a worse fate. Personally, I think I’d rather be tossed into a failing system than dumped on the doorstep of a man I don’t know.

Mom says he’s a good guy, though. They met when they were teenagers and at the time, they both lived in Texas. My grandparents were wealthy and Eric was the son of a housekeeper—not theirs, though. Mom and Eric had a best friend named Robert Montgomery and Eric’s mom, my paternal grandma, Lorraine, worked for the Montgomery’s. They were very generous employers and sent Eric to the same school that my mom and Robert attended. The three of them were thick as thieves, but my mom and Eric fell fast and hard for one another.

Sadly, as fast and hard as they fell, their relationship never took off. Mom says that’s because he believed he wasn’t good enough for her. According to her, he had this preconceived notion that the son of a housekeeper could never be worthy of a trust fund princess.

Lorraine and Eric left Texas and years later my parents coincidentally bumped into one another in Manhattan. Mom says it was fate and soon after she found out she was pregnant with me.

But they never spoke after that night.

Not once.

She sent him a letter after I was born, but she never received a reply. I don’t know if she ever tried contacting him again—if she did, she didn’t tell me, and I’m glad for that. I think if I knew he had turned her down more than once, this would be so much harder.

“Well, this can’t be right,” she says as she brings the car to a stop and leans over the console to stare out my window. Following her lead, I turn my head and glance at the saloon type bar called Big Nose Kate’s. “Brook, honey, are you sure you put the right address into the navigation?”

Fighting the urge to roll my eyes, I tear my gaze away from the horseshoes outlining the concrete steps and stare at the row of motorcycles parked on the gravel driveway.

“Oh, I put the right address in,” I confirm, looking back at her. “I thought you said this guy Robert was rich, that he was some big oil tycoon type person.”

That’s not right, she said Robert’s father was an oil tycoon. She never mentioned what he did exactly.

When she doesn’t answer, my gaze wanders back to the bar and I squint to get a better look at the emblem painted on the front door. It can’t be.

“Is that a reaper on the door?” I ask, completely baffled.

What the hell is this place?

Ignoring me, she turns off the car and braces both hands on the steering wheel as she draws in a deep breath. I watch as she slowly lifts her head and stares out the window at the group of bikes.

“Motorcycles,” she whispers.

Arching an eyebrow, I continue to study her.

“Yeah,” I agree slowly. “Lots and lots of motorcycles. I hope you have your pepper spray.”

Paying me no mind, she pulls down the visor and lifts her hand to touch the scarf covering her bald head.

“I should’ve worn the wig,” she murmurs, frowning.

A sense of sadness immediately washes over me. My mom isn’t the type to be self-conscious or even vulnerable. She never cries woe is me and since her diagnosis, she’s been a pillar of strength. I’m sure there are times she does in fact cry, but those moments are private and not for my eyes.

When her long locks started to fall out, she smiled and said it was only hair. It would grow back. And when it didn’t, she got all dressed up, put on her makeup and went wig shopping. Monday thru Friday she’s a brunette and on the weekends, she’s a blonde because she says the weekends are for fun and blondes definitely have more fun.

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