Frankly in Love (Frankly in Love, #1)(77)

It’s not a dream. There is indeed a cool hand on my forehead. It belongs to Mom.

Mom’s sitting on my bed in the dark in her sweatsuit pajamas, touching my forehead. Not checking for fever or anything. Just resting it there.

My heart surges with sudden tenderness. Countless times has she come in to touch my forehead while I was half asleep. Me, her boy, busily evolving while I slumbered to gradually grow taller, stronger, to grow up and away from her no matter what she thought or wanted.

Two bright lines flash in the dark. They are the twin streaks of her tears.

“Mom,” I say without moving.

“Daddy feel so sad,” says Mom.

“I’m sorry I lost it,” I murmur. “I shouldn’t have yelled like that.”

“It’s okay. Daddy love you so much.”

The tenderness inside me contracts into fear. We never say these kinds of words.

“Is Dad okay?”

“They checking bullet injury, they scanning whole Daddy’s chest with CT scan, PET scan, something like that.”

I can only watch as Mom blinks fresh wet tracks down her cheeks. I’ve seen Mom cry only a few times. She has the scariest way of crying. No sobbing or sniffling. Just silent tears, like her eyes have a leak that will not stop.

“Doctor say lung is okay, bullet injury is okay, but whole of torso, little bump they finding,” says Mom. “So many little bump. He say like Christmas tree. Doctor like you, he Korean yisei, second generation, speak only English.”

“What are you talking about, Mom?” I say it so quiet, so scared.

“I asking him, what is so many tiny-tiny bump everywhere? Doctor say is small-cell carcinoma. I asking him, what it is, carcinoma?”

I can’t say the word.

“Doctor say Daddy better start the chemo right away, so Daddy start right away.”

Cancer.

“At the first time, Daddy doing okay, no symptom at all.”

Cancer.

“But second time, Daddy getting sicker, sicker, sicker. Lose appetite.”

Cancer.

“I making vegetable juice and Chinese medicine, hanyak. Maybe it’s helping, I hope so. I hope so.”

And Mom just runs out of things to say.

The heat from my forehead has made her hand hot and moist, so she switches to the other one.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I say.

“He didn’t want you have to worry,” says Mom.

“What do you mean? Mom, I need to know these things.”

“If you worry, causing stress.”

“When did you find out?”

“If you worry, hurt the SAT score.”

“You found out that long ago? Jesus, Mom.”

“Frankie. We protecting your future. You understand me, right?”

I do and don’t at the same time. It confounds me how they managed to hide all this. They’ve been faking it for weeks.

“Does anyone at the Gathering know?” I say.

“Oh no,” says Mom gravely. “If we say something, everybody so worry. Too much talking-talking, too much stress. We waiting first Daddy get better, then we telling everybody. I hope so. I hope so.”

Mom’s voice shrinks until it’s nothing. I just stare at her for a long while. She’s looking at something in my room. It’s my night-light, which I’ve had since I was little. It’s twin baby star angels snuggled up to sleep upon a cloud in the heavens. I always assumed they were me and Hanna. But now I think they could be Mom-n-Dad.

“Is he gonna be okay?” I say finally.

“Doctor say six month,” says Mom. She nods to herself absently in the dark. “Six, maybe twelve month, yeah. Six to twelve month.”

My mind goes blank.

I can see Mom’s teeth flash as she bares them. “Why he get cancer? He eating so good. No smoking, no drug. No too much drinking. Maybe he working too much. But he sleep good. Why he get cancer?”

Now it’s my turn to cry. Mom squeezes the tears out of my eyes with her thumbs and wipes them up on the shoulders of her sleeves.

“You praying God every day,” says Mom. “I praying every day.”

“Okay,” I say, even though I’m undecided on prayer. I just say okay to say okay for Mom’s sake. Okay is my prayer.

Dad’s freak-out at the party now makes a kind of sense. There is no more room for any kind of crap from anyone anymore in Dad’s life. All the room has been taken up by the one big thing. There is no bigger thing anywhere.

Mom leaves.

I lie still in bed. I feel the air drift in to fill the space created by her absence. I sink down. Something is pushing me from above. It’s panic.

There’s an end coming.

Once upon a time, Dad was born. A bunch of shit happened as he grew up and grew older. I know none of those details. He married Mom, moved here, started The Store. He worked every day without a single break.

And now there’s an end coming.

How much of my dad do I know? He never tells me about his childhood, or his adulthood for that matter. I know some basic facts: his date and place of birth, what kinds of foods he likes, his favorite English poets, and so on. But now I realize it’s not much. Then again, how much is there to really know about a person? Dad settled into his role as breadwinner, expected me to settle into my role as disciplined academic, and we both put our noses to the grindstone and never looked back up.