Beauty and the Mustache

I glanced from her to the balloons and flowers still clutched in my hands.

“Oh.” I put them on the chair where I’d been sitting.

I’d almost made it to the door before she called me back again, “Ashley, one more thing. This is really important.” The urgency I heard in her voice made my heart rate spike and my eyes sting.

I crossed to her immediately and covered her hand with mine. “Anything…you can tell me anything.”

She gave me a weak smile, squeezed my hand with hers, and said, “This isn’t something you need to worry about yet. But when the time comes you should use hemorrhoid cream to remove bags under the eyes.”

***

Dr. Gonzalez found me coming back from the cafeteria, my momma’s rocky road ice cream clutched to my chest. He pulled me into a consultation room and broke the news I’d already guessed.

My mother was dying.

She had cervical cancer. It was stage four. It had metastasized everywhere. He gave her six weeks. Hospice had been called, and they were on their way.

She’d either ignored or confused the symptoms with menopause. He said she’d likely had symptoms for more than a year. I was not surprised that she’d disregarded her own pain. Her selflessness was her greatest strength and her most infuriating fault.

When I was sixteen, she’d walked around on a broken foot for two weeks. She finally went to the doctor when I handcuffed her to Billy’s truck and drove her to the emergency room.

After the chat with Dr. Gonzalez, I delivered my momma’s ice cream. Not long after that, the social worker for hospice arrived and spoke to us both. The entire experience was surreal.

My mother ate her ice cream and chimed in every once in a while with, “Now, I don’t want anyone to go to any trouble on my account.”

I could only stare at her. Words failed me. Thought and motor skills were also failing me.

It was decided that she would be released tomorrow and given transport back to the house. We would be assigned a day and a night nurse who would help us care for her over the next six weeks or so.

Six weeks.

I stayed for the rest of the day. We chatted about my job and her coworker friends at the library. She asked me to break the news first to her boss, Ms. Macintyre. Momma felt confident that Ms. Macintyre would know what to do about the rest of the staff.

I stumbled out of the hospital around 9:30 p.m. feeling exhausted and empty. My brain whispered to me as I walked to my car that the only thing I’d consumed that day was a triple-grande Americano at 7:00 a.m.

I wasn’t hungry, though. I was the opposite of hungry, but neither full nor satiated.

I slipped into the driver’s seat and stared unseeingly out the windshield, and was pulled from my trance by the sound of my cell phone ringing. I glanced at the caller ID. It was my friend Sandra, my best friend Sandra.

Relief and a tangible feeling I couldn’t name seized my body, a pain so sharp that I gasped. It felt like the glass chamber that had surrounded me all day had finally shattered. I was suddenly breathing, and the air that filled my lungs hurt. The photo of Sandra’s smiling face on my phone blurred, or rather my vision blurred because I was crying. I swiped my thumb across the screen and brought the phone to my ear.

“Hello?”

“Ashley! Thank God, you answered. Marie and I need you to settle a debate. Which is worse: not having enough yarn to finish a sweater or discovering that the yarn you used for the sweater was mislabeled as cashmere and is actually one hundred percent acrylic?”

My brain told me that it was Tuesday, which meant that back in Chicago where I lived and worked and had a lovely life reading books and enjoying my friends, it was knitting group night. Sandra, a pediatric psychiatrist with a pervy heart of gold, was in my knitting group, as was Marie.

“Sandra….” My voice broke, and I rested my head against the steering wheel, tears falling messy and hot down my cheeks and neck and nose.

“Oh! Oh, my darling….” Sandra’s voice emerged from the other end earnest and alarmed. “What’s going on? Are you okay? What happened? Who made you cry? Do I need to kill someone? Tell me what to do.”

I sniffled, squeezed my eyes shut against the new wave of tears. “It’s my mother.” I pressed my lips together in an effort to control my voice, then took a shaky breath and said, “She’s dying.”

“Your mother is dying?”

“They’ve called hospice. She has stage four cervical cancer. It’s metastasized everywhere. She has six weeks….” I sobbed, almost dropping the phone and shaking my head against the new onslaught of tears.

The other end was quiet for a beat. “Okay…where are you? I can be there by tomorrow.”

I shook my head. “No.” I sniffed and wiped my hand under my nose then took a deep breath. “No, no. Don’t do that. I just…I just needed to tell someone. I’m leaving the hospital now.”

“Are you in Knoxville?”

“Sandra….” I covered my eyes with my hand and sighed. “You are not flying down here.”

“Yes. I am flying down there.”

“So am I!” I heard Elizabeth’s voice from the other end. Elizabeth was also in my knitting group and was an emergency department physician. She worked with both Sandra and me at the hospital in Chicago.

Their threat to fly down to Tennessee sobered me, and I gathered a series of calming breaths before responding. “She’s at the hospital in Knoxville. They’re releasing her to home hospice tomorrow.”

I related the rest of the facts surrounding my mother’s sudden hospital admission, how she hadn’t told anyone she was sick, how she’d ignored all the signs and symptoms until it was too late. Reciting the details calmed me. By the time I was finished, the tears had receded.

“Oh, honey.” Sandra’s impossibly kind and empathetic voice soothed me from the other end of the line.

“Tell her I found tickets,” Elizabeth said in the background. “We can leave first thing tomorrow.”

A disbelieving laugh tumbled from my lips. “You can’t just drop everything and rush down here.”

“Yes, we can. We’ll see you tomorrow.” I heard Sandra say, “I want the aisle seat.” It was muffled, as if she’d covered the phone with her hand.

I heard a rustle and then Elizabeth’s voice was in my ear. She’d obviously commandeered the phone from Sandra. “Honey, listen. Sandra and I will be there tomorrow. Just text Sandra your home address. Don’t worry about anything. We’ll stay in a hotel and help you get your mother settled. Where are you going now? Is anyone there with you? One of your brothers?”

“No. I’m on my way back to the house now to tell them the news.”

Elizabeth tsked softly. “Oh, my dear friend, I wish we were already there. We would huddle hug and get drunk.”

“Me too,” I admitted, grateful that there were people in the world who loved me. I didn’t have the strength to argue against their generous offer, so I simply said, “Thank you.”

“No need for thanks. We’ll see you soon.”

I nodded, and my eyes watered again as I clicked off the call, but I blinked the wetness away. I needed to pull myself together. I needed to tell six boys that their momma was dying, and I had no idea how they were going to take the news.

After eight years with barely any contact, my brothers were basically strangers.

CHAPTER 3

“Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

I imagined that this was what Snow White must’ve felt like when she woke up in the presence of the seven dwarves.

Seven hovering beards.

Seven sets of bewildered eyes.

Seven inquisitive expressions—partly suspicious, partly amused.

The fainting was my fault.

I drove home from the hospital in a daze. I walked to the front porch. Jethro came out of the house trailed by several others. I glanced over his shoulder. The world went black.

I should have known better. I was a nurse for hootenanny’s sake! Two hours of sleep, no food, intense levels of stress; no wonder I passed out. I was lucky to have made it home without crashing my car. I’d never been in a position of forgetting to eat before.

Now I was laid out on the couch in my momma’s house surrounded by a sea of beards. I heard the roosters in the back crowing up a fuss.

My brothers’ expressions were varying degrees of anxious and curious. At last, my eyes settled on the measured, silvery blue stare of a stranger. My brain told me that this stranger’s name was Drew Runous, that he was a pillaging Viking highlander laird, and that earlier in the day he’d mentally pictured me getting my rub on.

Drew was sitting next to where I lay on the couch, leaning over me, one arm braced to the side and his hand at my temple.

That’s when the fuzzy-headedness began to retreat.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him groggily, placing my hand to my forehead as I tried to sit upright.

“Don’t do that.” He pushed my shoulders back to the couch. The hand at my temple moved to my wrist, his index and middle finger pressing against my pulse point. “You fainted. You need to take it slow.”