I don’t remember much about my mother’s first battle with cancer. I was five and a half. What I do remember are like pictures in an album. Lying on my stomach outside the bathroom door listening to her throwing up. Coming home from kindergarten to see her riding our lawn mower up and down the yard wearing a flaming red wig. After the radiation treatments started, I remember walking into the bathroom and seeing her in the tub. The red wig hung on the doorknob, and the few hairs left on her head were stringy. There was a long scar where her right breast had been, and her skin, all the way to her shoulder, looked crusty brown from the radiation.
Momma opened her eyes, caught me staring, and started to cover her chest with the washcloth. But she didn’t.
I said, “What did they do with the one they cut off?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know, honey. Threw it away, I guess.”
“Now you’re half girl, half boy like me.”
“We’re both still girls, we’re just missing a few of the parts.” She reached for my hand. “When this is over, I’m going to pretend this scar is a stem.” She traced it with a finger. “I’ll have a rose tattooed right here.” She pointed to the top of the scar. “What color shall we make it?”
“Purple,” I answered.
Momma smiled. “Purple it will be.”
“No, maybe red. To match your wig.”
“Okay.” She closed her eyes, and ladled handfuls of warm water onto her chest, avoiding the burned side.
“Momma?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Do we have any scissors?”
“Sure. There’s a pair in my sewing box, and another in the drawer under the microwave.” She opened her eyes and looked at me. “Why?”
“I want to cut my pee-pee off and throw it away.”
“Oh, Morgan, honey.” She sat up and wrapped her wet arms around me. “That would hurt terribly, sweetheart.” Tears filled her eyes. “There’s nothing we can do about your anatomy until you’re older. You have to be patient.”
“I hate it.”
“I know, but promise me you’ll never do anything to hurt yourself.”
My father still lived with us back then. I remember his bathrobe hanging from a hook on the back of the door. “I promise,” I whispered
They found cancer in her other breast when I was seven and a half. My most vivid memory of that time is Momma, wearing only panties, standing in front of the full-length mirror on her closet door. She looked at me and smiled a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Now I’ll be able to walk without listing to port.”
“What does that mean?”
“Leaning to the left. It’s a nautical term. Starboard is the right side of a boat, port the left.”
“You’re funny.”
“I suppose so.” She ran her index finger over the ridge of stitches.
After Momma got sick the second time, Dad was around less and less. She told me he’d found construction work out of town. It might have been true.
They fought a lot, often because of me. He said she was turning me into a sissy.
“My father used to call ’em Nancy boys,” Daddy said, during one of those fights.
“Shame on you,” Momma said, then turned and saw me standing in the kitchen doorway.
“What’s a Nancy boy?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Momma said. “There’s no such thing.”
“See.” Daddy opened the refrigerator and took out a beer. “You’re letting him get away with this malarkey. He needs to man up.”
I was four or five when Momma told my father I was insisting I was a girl. He said I just needed a good thrashing to get that out of my system. Momma never mentioned it again, and told me it was not something we needed to discuss with my father.
Daddy put his beer on the counter and made two fists. “Put ’em up.” He punched my shoulder, then jabbed the air between us and hopped from side to side.
I laughed, made fists, and danced just out of his reach.
“Jesus, son. That’s what I mean. Get your thumbs out of your fists. If you hit someone with those girly things, your thumbs will snap off at the joints like crab claws.”
A couple weeks after my eighth birthday, Dad left and never came back, even though he promised he would. They must have gotten a divorce because less than a year later Momma met and married my stepfather, Stan. Her cancer was in remission at the time and our lives seemed normal for a while. I never understood why she had to get married, why she couldn’t wait for my father to come back. That’s the one thing I hold against her: she gave up on my dad too soon, then died and left me with a man who was little more than a stranger.
Maddy’s told me time and again that my mother was just looking for a little happiness after everything she’d been through, but I still get angry about it—though usually only after some flare-up with Stan. Six months after their wedding, the cancer came back, this time in her bones and her liver. After that, and until she died, I practically lived at Maddy’s house.
It seems I took a long time to realize Momma was going to die. I remember resenting that she couldn’t get better and be there for me like a real mom. I feel guilty about that now, but back then it seemed like she could get better if she tried harder.
Momma died a year and a half ago, when I was almost ten, leaving me with my stepfather. Eleven months and four days after she passed, he married Cindee. Cindee used to work at Sherwood Oaks, a local nursing home. She was also a hospice volunteer, which is how Stan met her. She helped with my mom. Now she does home health three days a week.
I liked her fine when she was taking care of Mom and didn’t think much of it when Stan invited her over for dinner a couple of times after Mom died. We always told Mom stories and laughed about her mowing the yard wearing that red wig, or how she was the only person who could pick up a pill bug—“or would want to,” Cindee interjected with a shudder—and not have it roll into a defensive little ball.
Cindee’s the opposite of my mother, short and pudgy, bleached blonde, lots of makeup. It never crossed my mind that Stan liked her in that way, until he came home one night and told me they were going to Las Vegas to get married.
That I didn’t ask about their trip didn’t stop Cindee from getting all giggly when she told me the story. They went to a drive-through wedding chapel, both wearing sunglasses. Stan kept his foot on the brake and the engine running. The justice of the peace leaned out the window and said before he’d marry them, they’d have to take off their sunglasses and turn off the car. “This is a drive-through wedding chapel, not a drive-by.”
It was funny, I guess, but all I could think about was, I had just turned eleven and was now stuck with living with them until I’m eighteen unless Dad comes back. Cindee’s nice enough, and Stan’s okay, but I have a real father out there somewhere, and my real mother is dead.