Slammed (Slammed #1)(55)

He's looking directly at me as he zooms in on another line.

understood that it wasn’t just their lives at hand.

"Everyone assumes they have at least one more day. If my parents had any clue what was about to happen to them before it happened, they would have done everything in their power to prepare us. Everything. It's not that they weren't thinking about us, it's that they weren't thinking about death."

He highlights the last line of his poem.

Death. The only thing inevitable in life…

I look at the phrase and I read it. I read it again. I read it again, and again, and again. I read it until the end of the class period, after everyone around me has left. Everyone but Will.

He's sitting at his desk, watching me. Waiting for me to understand.

"I get it, Will," I finally whisper. “I get it. In the first line, when you said that death was the only thing inevitable in life…you emphasized the word death. But when you said it again at the end of the poem, you didn't emphasize the word death, you emphasized the word life. You put the emphasis on life at the end. I get it, Will. You're right. She's not trying to prepare us for her death. She's trying to prepare us for her life. For what she has left of it."

He leans forward and turns the projector off. I grab my stuff, and I go home.

***

I sit on the edge of my mother's bed. She's asleep in the center of it. She doesn't have a side anymore, now that she sleeps in it alone.

She's still wearing her scrubs. When she wakes up and takes them off, it'll be the last time she takes off a pair of scrubs. I wonder if that's why she's still wearing them, because she realizes this too.

I watch the rhythm of her body as she breathes. With every breath that she inhales, I can hear the struggle of her lungs within her chest. The struggle of lungs that failed her.

I reach over and stroke her hair. When I do, a few of the strands fall off into my fingers. I pull my hand back and slowly wrap them around my finger as I walk to my room and pick my purple hair clip up off the floor. I open the clip and place the strands of hair inside and snap it shut. I place the clip under my bedroom pillow and I go back to my mother's room. I slide into the bed beside her and wrap my arms around her. She finds my hand and we interlock fingers as we talk without saying a single word.

16.

" "

-The Avett Brothers, COMPLAINTE D'VN MATELOT MOURANT

Chapter Sixteen

After my mother falls back to sleep, I go to the grocery store. Kel's favorite food is basagna. It's how he used to say lasagna, so we still call it basagna. I gather everything I need for the meal and I go back home and start cooking.

"Smells like basagna," Mom says as she comes out of her bedroom. She's in regular clothes now. She must have taken her scrubs off for the last time.

"Yep. I figured we could make Kel his favorite tonight. He'll need it."

She walks to the sink and washes her hands before she starts helping me layer the noodles.

"So, I guess we finally stopped carving pumpkins?" she asks.

"Yep," I reply. "The pumpkins have all been carved."

She laughs.

"Mom? Before he gets here, we need to talk. About what's going to happen to him."

"I want to, Lake. I want to talk about it."

"Why don't you want him to be with me? Do you not think I'm capable? That I wouldn't make a good mom?"

She layers the last of the noodles as I cover them with sauce.

"Lake, I don't think that at all. I just want you to be able to live your life. I've spent the entire last eighteen years raising you, teaching you everything I know. It's supposed to be time for you to go screw up. Make mistakes. Not raise a child."

"But sometimes life doesn't happen in chronological order," I say. "You're a prime example of that. If it did, you wouldn't die until you were supposed to. Until you were seventy-seven or so, I think. That's the average age of death."

She laughs and shakes her head.

"Seriously, Mom. I want him. I want to raise him. He'll want to stay with me, you know he will. You have to give us the choice. We haven't had a choice in any of this. You have to give us this one."

"Okay," she says.

"Okay? Okay you'll think about it? Or okay, okay?"

"Okay, okay."

I hug her. I hug her tighter than I've ever hugged her before.

"Lake?" she says. "You're getting basagna sauce all over me."

I pull away and realize I'm still holding the spatula and it's dripping all over her back.

***

"Why can't he come over?" Kel asks after I pull in the driveway and send Caulder home.

"I told you already. Mom needs to talk to us."

We walk inside the house and Mom is putting the basagna in the oven.

"Mom, guess what?" Kel says as he runs to the kitchen.

"What, Sweetie?"

"Our school is having a costume contest on Halloween. The winner gets fifty bucks!"

"Fifty bucks? Wow. Have you decided what you want to be yet?"

"Not yet." He walks over to the bar and throws his backpack down.

"Did your sister tell you we're all having a talk tonight?"