by Pamela Morsi
“Accidents happen, Dad,” Sonny replied. “There is no one hundred percent fail-safe contraceptive.”
Sonny moved the black knight to h7.
His father raised an eyebrow. “There is abstinence,” Vern said.
There was no way to argue that.
Vern’s white pawn took the black pawn at d6.
“Please listen, Dad,” Sonny pleaded. “I know that you and Mama are angry and disappointed in me. I’m really sorry about that. I can’t change what’s already happened. But if you punish me by not helping me, there’s a very good chance that I won’t be able to finish school.”
Vern nodded. “I’m probably more aware of that than you are,” he said.
“Then you have to help.”
Sonny moved the black pawn to c5.
His father shook his head. “I’m not doing this to punish you,” he told Sonny. “Your mother, she’s really mad, she’s probably in this to punish you or manipulate you, but that’s not my thinking.”
“What are you thinking?” Sonny asked.
“I’m thinking that you’ve have a very nice, middle-class upbringing,” Vern said. “That you’ve never had to struggle or worry or face adversity. We made it easy for you. The world was handed to you on a platter. That’s not always best for people. You’re going to have to figure out your own way now, and it’s going to be tough. But I have confidence in you. You’ll make it on your own and you’ll have cause to be proud of yourself. And you and your little wife will not have to be beholden to us ever at all. That can be a good thing.”
Vern moved the white queen to a8.
“Checkmate,” he said.
In the weeks following, Sonny continued to feel hurt and disappointed at his parents’ rejection. Dawn was delighted.
“We don’t need them,” she told him. “Just blow ’em off and forget they ever existed. That’s what I did with my relatives and I highly recommend it.”
Sonny wasn’t ready to do that. But with his mother’s obvious resentment and his increased obligations, he saw them less and less. If he was going to ever be able to afford college again, he wouldn’t be able to take a minimum-wage job. He tried to find something that paid more. Without education and in a tough job market, it wasn’t easy. Ultimately, he joined up with a logging crew. It was hard, dangerous, outside work. But it paid well.
“Just stick close to me,” Lonnie Beale, a veteran tree feller in his midforties, told him the first day. “I’ve been managing to come home every day for twenty-two years. You do like I do and you’ll do all right.”
It was a time in Sonny’s life when things were tough and complicated. He’d always been close to his father, always been able to talk things over with him. That relationship was now strained. On the daily grind, Lonnie became a surrogate father to him.
“Dawn says she happier than she’s ever been in her life. But anything and everything that goes wrong and she just bursts into tears.”
Lonnie chuckled. “That’s just baby carrying,” he reassured him. “My late wife, God rest her soul, gave me six before her heart give out. Each and every one come different. Some she was crazy as a hatter for nine months. Others she’s sweet. Some she’s crying. Another she’s mad enough to kill me. Hormones don’t have no sense, so don’t waste your time trying to make sense of ’em.”
Sonny laughed.
“Just keep loving her,” Lonnie advised. “Say ‘yes, dear’ and ‘no, dear’ and wait it out. She’ll be the gal you thought you married soon enough.”
The afternoon Dawn went into labor, the hospital called the supervisor on the radio. The cell phone reception was terrible on the mountain where they were cutting. He got a lift into town in the cab of a log truck. He was antsy, nervous, the ride seemed interminable.
When he finally arrived at the hospital, he was surprised to see his parents there.
“Did Dawn call you?”
“The hospital notified us as the emergency contact,” Vern said. “They weren’t sure you’d get the message. And naturally we want to be here for the birth of our first grandchild.”
His mother didn’t look all that pleased. But they were here and Sonny was grateful. Though he didn’t really have time to say so. The baby was crowning, they told him. He had to hurry to the birthing room if he was going to see his child come into the world.
He should have felt a little foolish dressed as he was in blue scrubs and a paper hair net, but for Sonny that was nothing when compared to the overwhelming experience of fatherhood. Dawn held his hand, moaning and sweating as she pushed their baby into the world.
“It’s a girl,” the physician announced.
“A girl?”
Somehow that was even more unbelievable. This was a little girl, a real human being that hadn’t existed before but was now here on earth and was his responsibility.
The doctor let him cut the cord. His hands were shaking.
Sonny was laughing and crying and talking to his young wife all at the same time.
“She’s beautiful! Dawn, she’s absolutely beautiful.”
“Is she all right? Does she have all her fingers and toes?”
He reassured her. “She’s perfect, perfect.”
While the nurses washed and weighed the baby and wrapped her in a little pink blanket, Sonny leaned over Dawn and kissed her.
“Are you sorry it’s not a boy?” she asked him.
The question surprised him. “A boy? Yuk. I’m a boy, and they’re not all they’re cracked up to be,” he answered. “They’re messy and dirty. They’re like lava lamps, fun to look at but not too bright. I love girls. A girl suits me perfectly.”
Dawn gave him a serious look. “You’re sure,” she said.
Sonny nodded. “I’m the luckiest guy in the world to have two wonderful girls. I have my Dawn and now I have this little sweetie.”
The nurse brought the baby over and laid her at her mother’s breast. The child opened her eyes for a moment then gave a big yawn. They both oohed and aahed as if she’d done something wonderful.
“What are we going to call her?” Dawn asked.
Sonny looked thoughtful. “I don’t know. Did you have something in mind?”
She looked at me closely. “Well, I was thinking of something like Emily or Sarah,” she told him.
“Those are pretty names, I guess,” he said. “But pretty ordinary and this little girl is definitely extraordinary. I think we need to give her a name that fits that.”
“Like what?”
“Well, she’s beautiful and majestic and she’s from the mountains of Tennessee. Maybe we should give her a mountain name.”
Dawn lowered her head and eyed him skeptically. “You’re going to call my daughter Rocky Top?”
He laughed.
“Let’s name her after mountains, beautiful mountains,” he said.
“I don’t know any mountains,” Dawn admitted.
“Well, there’s Yosemite,” Sonny said. “But that would be a lot for a little girl to spell. Guess she could call herself Sam for short. She might grow up to have red hair, but the handlebar moustache would be tough.”
“Shut up!” Dawn scolded playfully and feigned a punch at him for being silly. The cartoon character Yosemite Sam did not in the least resemble their beautiful daughter.
“Well, I do think it has to be mountains,” Sonny said. “You know how much I love the mountains.”
Dawn was thoughtful. “Appalachia? Himalaya?”
“She’s kind of small for those big places,” Sonny said. “We ought to go with a smaller range. We’ll call her Sierra,” Sonny said. “Do you like that?”
Dawn sighed. “That’s a perfect name for our perfect little girl.”
His parents were less thrilled.
“What kind of name is that?” his mother asked.
“It’s a pretty name,” he answered.
Phrona puffed out a little sigh of disgust. From her purse she retrieved a hefty printout.
“Sonny, you have a venerable heritage to draw upon. I’ve compiled family names back through the Massachusetts ancestors and to Combe St. Nicholas and Northover,” she said. “You don’t just give a child a name. It’s important to tie future generations to the past.” She tore off the back pages of the stack. “Here are the girls.”
Randomly Sonny glanced through the list.
“Mehitable? Zinithia?” He shook his head. “Come on, Mama.”
She was adamant. “It’s a long list. There are plenty of Sarahs and Chloes and Hannahs.”
“No,” he told her, firmly. “Dawn and I are naming our daughter Sierra. Get to like it.”
REAL LIFE
12
Mom made me promise not to say anything to Sierra. She wanted to talk to us both, alone. When we got home from the library she called us into her room. We sat down on her bed, while she paced. After a couple of moments of her walking silently back and forth, she suggested we move to the porch. That wasn’t any better. Mom tried to sit in a chair across from the glider, but she couldn’t be still.
“Let’s walk,” she said.
We headed along the sidewalk, Mom and Sierra side by side, me following behind. The late afternoon was overcast and muggy, with all the uncomfortable heat of summer and none of the pleasure of sunshine.
My sister, giddy and self-involved as always, took this opportunity to tell Mom about the guy she’d met at the library. No one would ever accuse Sierra of being secretive. She gave Mom what sounded like a word-for-word replay of her conversation with Seth. She told it as if the information revealed about the sport of skateboarding was fascinating.
I wanted to kick her. With all the stuff Mom had on her mind, the last thing I thought she needed was an up-close-and-personal view of Sierra’s love life.
Mom, however, seemed to relax as Sierra talked. She began smiling and even laughed once at some truly inane comment my sister made.
By the time we reached the edge of the neighborhood, Mom was more like herself, bolstered somehow by Sierra’s self-absorption.
In the shade of the giant cement interstate over-pass, a small, well-kept playground had sprouted. There was a large wooden fort with turrets and a bridge that could be accessed directly by stairs or, for the more adventurous, rope ladders were available. Mom led us through the open gate and toward an empty area where there was a merry-go-round. She and Sierra sat down and urged me to push them.
I ran around the edge to get them going and then jumped on as we spun round and round like little kids.
As we slowed, Mom held her feet straight out, careful not to drag the ground. She was making it last as long as possible. Only when we were at a complete stop did she turn and lay a hand on Sierra’s arm with only a quick glance in my direction.
“There’s no way to say this, except just to say it,” she began. “I have cancer.”
I expected Sierra to react like I had. Shock and fear and a thousand questions. Surprisingly, she seemed very calm. She let Mom talk. And despite the secrecy that had surrounded our move to Knoxville, Mom seemed to welcome the opportunity to tell what she knew. She talked and talked and talked to us. She talked about how good the hospital was, how nice the doctors were, how much safer treatments had become.
She never once talked about dying. That was all I could think about.
“So this surgery you’re going to have,” Sierra asked. “It’s like they take out the cancer and then you’re done with it?”
“No, the lymphomas are not like that,” Mom answered. “They don’t really settle in an organ. The lymph glands go all over the body, like the veins and arteries. So you may get a mass in one place or the other, but the cancer is sort of everywhere all at once.”
“And so they take out the tumors as you get them?”
“No, that’s not what they do with this kind of cancer. They’re taking this tumor out to get a really good look at it,” she answered. “They will send it off to a lab and get it analyzed so they can say with certainty what stage it is at and how best to treat it.”
“Maybe they’ll find out it’s really not a cancer at all,” Sierra suggested.
Mom shook her head. “It’s definitely non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. They’ve even got a more specific name for it. But the doctors here have ordered more tests and they want to confirm for themselves the type and stage. If it turns out to be exactly what they think it is now, well, it’s what they call an aggressive cancer. I’ll have to start getting treatment right away.”
“So what is the treatment like?” Sierra asked.
“It’s…it’s medicine,” she said. “They just give me medicine. They call it chemotherapy, but I know that word sounds very scary, probably scarier than it ought to sound. It’s really just medicine.”
“Are you going to lose your hair?” Sierra asked.
I wanted to kick her; she was totally missing the point.
Mom shrugged. “Maybe,” she said. “With chemo, that’s pretty common.”
Sierra nodded. “That anchorwoman on TV who had breast cancer said that her hair came back in a slightly lighter color and naturally curly. Wouldn’t that be cool, to start off again with all new hair?”
I rolled my eyes. My sister was a certifiable smush brain! But Mom laughed.
“Yeah,” she agreed with Sierra. “That might be cool.”
The attitude of the two of them so cheerful and casual just made me crazy. They played on the swings and teased each other, like nothing really real was even happening.
While Sierra was being a doofus on the monkey bars, Mom turned her attention to me.
“It’s all going to be fine,” she told me.
I wasn’t reassured.
“You knew you had cancer before we came to Tennessee.” My tone sounded accusing, but that’s exactly how I felt.
“Of course I knew,” she admitted. “This knot came up in my groin. I ignored it for months, but it didn’t go away. Finally, I went to the doctor. I got the preliminary results the day that we left.”
“So Sonny Moroney didn’t leave us,” I said. “You made that up.”
Mom shook her head. “He did leave,” she said. “We both knew that he would. We’d talked about my options. But his option was to walk away and he did that.”
“So you told him,” I accused. “You told some nobody boyfriend who just walks in and out of your life, but you didn’t tell us. You didn’t tell me.”
“I’m telling you now,” Mom said.
“Why didn’t you say anything to us?” I asked her. “You just ripped us up and dragged us across the country to live with strangers without any explanation. Why did you have to be so secretive?”
Mom hesitated for a long moment. “Because I’m the mother,” she answered. “I had to figure out what is best for us. I know you think our family is a democracy, but it’s not. I’m the adult. The decisions are mine.”
“It’s not what’s best for us. It’s what’s best for you,” I complained louder. “You brought us here so that you could dump us with Vern and Mrs. Leland.”
She shook her head. “I told you, that’s crazy, Dakota. I’d never leave you girls.”
“If you die you’ll leave, permanently. And it’s pretty convenient to die with us living in their house.”
“I didn’t say anything about dying,” Mom answered. “And don’t you breathe even a word about it around your sister.”
“But that’s what all this is about,” I said. “I’m not an idiot, Mom. I can figure things out.”
“It’s my backup,” she said. “If, and I said if, something were to happen to me, I have to have some backup. I grew up in foster care. If we’d stayed in Texas, foster care would have been my backup. I would go anywhere, do anything, get along with anyone to keep my daughters from having to do the same.”
“You could just stay alive then,” I snarled.
I was angry. I was really angry. I knew it was stupid to feel that way, but that’s exactly how I felt.
“Dakota, I’m going to do everything I can to keep living,” she told me softly. “And I’m doing that for you girls. If it was just me, I’d run again. I’d head down to the Keys or maybe even Mexico. I’d hang out on the beach and drink to sunrises, have a few laughs with what time I have left. If I was alone in the world, that’s what I’d do. But, I’m not alone in the world. I have you and Sierra and I’m going to do everything that the doctors tell me.”
“So you’ll be all right then?”
I didn’t get my question answered. Sierra ran up then to join us. I would never have said anything around my sister.
As we walked back to the Leland’s house, it was the two of them together again and me on the sidewalk behind. I had never felt so left out in my life. I was totally scared. And they were acting as if they were just setting off on another goofy road trip.
It was even worse for me as the evening went on. During dinner Mom and Sierra kept yukking it up. Vern seemed inclined to follow their lead. So the only serious-looking people at the table were me and Mrs. Leland. I was not at all pleased to be on her team.
At least she waited for dessert to go over the details that we all knew.
“So this ‘second look’ biopsy will be day after tomorrow?” she said.
“Yes,” Mom answered.
“How long will you be in the hospital? A couple of days?”
“Maybe not even overnight,” Mom answered. “If everything goes well, they ought to let me come home as soon as I’m out of recovery.”
“Then you’ll probably require some care after you get home,” Mrs. Leland said.
“Not much, I’m sure. And the girls are very good at that sort of thing,” Mom said. “We’ve always taken care of each other.”
“That’s a tremendous responsibility for children,” Mrs. Leland said.
“My girls are very mature for their age,” Mom said.
“I’m sure they’ve had to be,” she said.
I knew that was meant as a deliberate jab at Mom. She punched right back.
“Yes, my girls have never had the chance to get spoiled and lazy like middle-class children,” Mom said. “I hope the kids in this neighborhood don’t turn out to be a bad influence on them.”
