Page 22 of Pipe Dreams
When he gave Shelly a curious glance, she mumbled thatthe smell of food cooking was something she couldn’t really tolerate lately.
Mike wondered what Elsa had been eating, then. The answer was revealed when he opened the freezer to find stacks of frozen kids’ meals. Unease coated his gut. Shelly had always prided herself on making everything from scratch. No wonder Elsa was terrified. Food from a box was the equivalent of Armageddon in this house.
That night he put his little girl to bed the way he’d done a million times. Well, not a million. He traveled too much for that. But it felt good to tuck her in knowing that he’d eased her mind a little.
His child was suffering. In all her eleven years, he’d never seen her so scared. Not even when she broke her arm and had to have surgery to repair the break.
Mike kissed her forehead one more time and closed her bedroom door quietly. Shelly was waiting for him, sitting at the bottom of the steps.
He sat down beside her. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey.” She didn’t look him in the eye. “I have a couple of things to tell you. You want the good news or bad news first?”
“The good news.”And please make it good.
“Divorce papers are done. I got mine from FedEx today, and yours went to the clubhouse.”
“Wow. Okay.” For a split second his heart soared. He knew it weighed on Lauren to date a technically married man. Then reality kicked in. “What’s the bad news?”
“I got some test results from Johns Hopkins.”
His spine tingled. “And?”
“Same as Sloan Kettering, only they put a number on it.”
“A number?”
“The five year survival rate for this kind of cancer at this stage. It’s...” He heard her swallow roughly. “Twelve percent.”
His stomach dropped all the way to his shoes, and he almost asked her to repeat it. There’s no way twelve could be right.
How the fuck could that be right?
She sat very still beside him, not breathing. And he had a déjà vu moment. Twelve years ago they’d had a different but equally terrifying conversation.I’m pregnant,she’d said at that time. He didn’t think there was anything as scary as that.
He’d been wrong.
Now his throat closed up as it had done the other time, too. “I’m so sorry,” he croaked out.
“Me, too,” she whispered.
His mind whirled, trying to adjust to what it might mean. What she’d said was so big he knew he’d need a couple days to get his head around it.
He might be making a lot of pancakes this summer.
“Take Elsa away in June,” Shelly said suddenly.
“What?” he gasped, playing catchup. “Where?”
“Doesn’t matter. Ontario. Disney World. Take her on vacation. I can’t do it right now. Too many treatments. And there will be more specialists. She’ll end up just going to day camp if she stays here with me. I’ll have to get my parents to move in with me to get her back and forth.”
The tightness in his chest doubled down. Shelly’s parents were jerks. They’d shamed her for getting pregnant when she was a teenager and shamed her again for having an affair and getting divorced. Elsa didn’t like them all that well, either.
His little girl’s summer looked grim.
“I’ll think of something,” he said. But would he? If he couldn’t get Elsa to leave the house for pizza, she wouldn’t be bamboozled into a three week vacation, no matter how exciting.
“We’ll talk tomorrow,” Shelly said quietly. “Or the next day.”
