3
Sienna
“So, how was Cheyenne?”
I look up from the sink, a handful of dripping silverware in my hands, and stare at Beck while my heart spins in my chest. How does she know about my appointment? “What?”
Beck pulls her perfect eyebrows together. “Didn’t you pick up a saddle in Cheyenne this week?”
I exhale slowly and look away from her now-curious expression. I focus on the sink full of dishes left over from my birthday dinner, which Aunt Lottie, Beck’s mom, hosted tonight. “Oh, yeah, it was good.” I extol the virtues of the saddle while I put the silverware into the dishwasher. I haven’t thought about the saddle even once since I put it in the barn two days ago.
“I’ll have to come see it once you get it fixed up,” Beck says, joining me at the sink. I volunteered for dishes because I’m all but coming out of my skin tonight. The doctor’s office hasn’t called with the results of my biopsy, and my anxiety is growing by the hour. Does a longer wait mean bad news? Like, they ran the tests a second time to make sure? I’ve been reading personal accounts of breast cancer survivors online. They are terrifying.
“I’ll let you know when the saddle is ready for your shameless praise,” I say, leaving out that it might be a while before I fix it up. Or never. Silence descends, and I panic a little because I can feel Beck watching me, wondering at my odd reaction and avoidance of eye contact. If anyone can break this shell I’ve tried to put up, it’s Beck, but if I tell her it will become a wildfire out of control.
Officially, Beck and I are cousins—second, once removed—but she’s also been my best friend for most of my life. Her closest sibling is seventeen years older than her, and she’s only two years older than me. We’ve grown up together. She lived in town and I was out on the flats, but we danced in the same dance classes and joined roping club the same year. I took to heeling and goat tying in junior rodeo while she dominated barrel racing—always the more glamorous girl’s event. There are more pictures of my childhood with her in them than without, and our lives were supposed to continue their parallel course after high school. Here we are, though, and she’s got two kids and I’ve got none. She’s got a marriage that’s working, and I’ve lived apart from Tyson for almost half a year. She fits in everywhere she goes, and I fit nowhere anymore, except maybe with Daddy at the ranch. I’ve always belonged with Dad.
“Thank you for the cake,” I say, trying to present a “free and easy” mood. I’ve thanked her twice already, but she doesn’t remind me.
“You know I love an excuse to bake your mom’s cake,” she says, then knocks me with her shoulder. “And I happen to think your birthday is a pretty good thing to celebrate.”
Mom’s chocolate cake has been part of every birthday I can remember. Aunt Lottie made it when I was growing up, and then Beck started making it for me when we were teenagers. Two years ago, when I couldn’t make it home for my usual spring visit during which we always celebrate my birthday with the family, Beck overnighted a frozen birthday cake to me in Chicago, perfectly thawed by the time it arrived. I was working full time to save up for IVF treatments and called Beck with blubbering thanks; she always knows just the thing. It took Tyson and me a week to eat the whole cake, and I didn’t regret a single bite even though I was supposed to be watching my sugar preparatory to the egg harvesting we did a few weeks later. I still tell myself that one cake couldn’t have made a difference, but after dissecting every move I made, it continues to be one of the things I narrow my eyes at and wonder, Was it you?
Beck and I chat while we fill the dishwasher and then start washing the bigger pans and dishes by hand. We can hear the other adults talking in the living room. Uncle Rich is on the city council this year and keeps us up to date on what’s happening in Lusk politics, such as they are. Beck’s brother—that seventeen-years-older-than-her sibling—Malachi just accepted a job offer that that will be taking him and his family to Sioux Falls next month. He’ll be the third of Uncle Rich and Aunt Lottie’s kids to leave Lusk. Aunt Lottie got teary when the topic came up at dinner. Used to be that Grandma Dee would be right there in the fray of these after-dinner discussions, usually offering a contrary opinion to Uncle Rich. I’ve been missing her lately. Not that I ever didn’t miss her, but it’s been different this last week. Maybe because I want someone to be strong for me, and if Grandma Dee was anything, it was strong. Without her, I’m the strong one in the family, and the thought makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time. Grandma Dee was always getting after me to toughen up. I wish I’d done a better job of that. If I were tough enough, then surely I wouldn’t be feeling so unsteady.
I realize the kitchen has gone quiet right before Beck asks, “Are you okay?”
I smile wider and look up at her with my most innocent expression. “Yeah, just thinking about all the baby cows that will be dropping soon.” This is a flimsy excuse, because we’re still ten days out. We plan our gestational calendars to the day and therefore expect our first calves on the first day of April. There’s always a chance of calves coming a few days early, but usually they start late if anything. Once it starts, ho boy. Hang on to your hat and hope your horse is hardy.
“How many do you expect this year?”
“Ninety-three,” I say.
“It’s gonna be a busy few weeks, then,” Beck says.
“Yeah, but it looks like it will be good weather—at least this first week out. Thank goodness for that.”
“No doubt,” Beck says. Her contribution to the ranch is helping with the meals at branding, which brings out any Reynold willing and able to dig in. We brand over Memorial Day weekend, and it’s the Reynold family version of a reunion. “Did you hear from Tyson today? For your birthday.”
I scrub at a pan with some burnt gravy on the bottom. “Yeah, he texted,” I say easily. He’d tried to call, but I’d let it go to voice mail. Then he sent a happy birthday GIF. I responded with a smiley face emoji a few hours later when I knew he’d be asleep. London is seven hours ahead of Wyoming time. I blame a lot of our difficulty communicating on time zones.
“Huh.” There is something calculating in Beck’s tone that causes me to give her a sideways look and wish I’d told her that I’d talked to Ty for an hour. I’m lying about so many other things that a fake phone call wouldn’t be too much to add onto the heap. “Did you hear that Reggie’s back in town?” Beck says.
I turn my attention to the dishes and keep my tone dry. “I hadn’t.”
“Just yesterday. He’s doing really great on the circuit.”
“That’s what I’ve heard.” Reggie is cousins with Beck’s husband, which shouldn’t mean that much in a town where cousins abound, but somehow it does. He’s a year older than me, but we did 4-H together, roping club, and dated for a few months in high school—I was his date for his junior prom, and you’d think we’d gotten engaged that night, the way everyone just expected we’d be the next couple who had wedding photos within three years of their junior prom pictures. The summer after that junior prom, Tyson’s family moved in. I’m still not sure if Reggie and I had already started to fizzle before he came, but we definitely fizzled afterward. Reggie was working his uncle’s ranch outside of Cody that summer, so he wasn’t around much. Tyson, on the other hand, was new and exciting and needed someone to show him around our one-horse town. Every day. For two months. I broke up with Reggie via a text message, and he started dating Courtney Miser as soon as he got home—he knew I couldn’t stand Courtney Miser. But I didn’t really care. No one sparkled for me the way Tyson did. Reggie could have Courtney and any other girl he wanted. Somehow at seventeen years old, I knew I had Tyson. Dad said he and Mom had fallen in love like that—love at first sight.
“We should get a group together,” Beck says. “Grab some dinner one night and catch up with the old posse.” Those of us who rodeoed had called ourselves the Lusk Posse back in high school. I’d forgotten about that but don’t smile at the memory even though it’s a happy one.
“I’m married, Beck.” I rinse out the scrubbed-clean gravy pan and put it on one of the dishtowels we’ve laid out. Beck picks up the pan and starts to dry with one of Aunt Lottie’s days-of-the-week embroidered flour sack towels. Beck and I had matching days-of-the-week underwear when we were kids—I was religious about wearing the right pair on the right day. Beck purposely wore them out of order. Such a rebel.
I expect her to backpedal and pretend she wasn’t making as pointed a suggestion as my response infers. She can say, “It’s only dinner” or “You’ve known Reggie all your life, I’m not suggesting you date him.”
Instead she says, “Are you?”
I look up sharply, and she holds my eyes. I feel the flush in my neck and move on to the next pan. She wants me to defend myself and explain more details about my current marriage situation. I should just put down the pan and drop my defenses and tell her that I think I’m done and just need the chance to tell Tyson. But I don’t tell her this because . . . well, I don’t know really. I don’t know why I haven’t told her where things are between Tyson and me long before now, except maybe I’m not ready to admit that things are so screwed up. I’m tired of well-intentioned sympathy wrapped up in words like “In God’s time” and “You just need to relax.” Those comments were made every time I came back to Lusk without a baby in my arms or in my belly. If word got out that my husband and I weren’t speaking to each other anymore and I literally could not remember the last time we had sex . . . I wasn’t ready to field the pity.
Beck turns so that her lower back is leaning against the sink right next to me and it’s harder for me to avoid eye contact, though I manage.
“It’s been, what, six months?”
“Since I came back to the ranch to help Dad? Yeah.” I scrub more than I need to in order to demonstrate my focus on the work at hand. Beck can’t see that the pan is clean from her new position against the sink, so I really play it up.
“You know what I mean.”
I know exactly what she means, but I’m not going there. Beck is a fixer, and I don’t want to be her newest project. “Tyson has a one-year contract in London, and I couldn’t go with him because Dad needed me at the ranch after he got sick.”
“And you miss Tyson so much that the two of you texted for your birthday. Half the town thinks you’re already divorced. Everyone calls you Sienna Chadwick.”
I lock eyes with her. “Half the town simply can’t remember my married name. And I’m not divorced, so it doesn’t matter what people think.” I’m not surprised that people are talking and concluding, even colluding, but it grates on me, surprise or not. I don’t like being the center of attention in a room any more than the center of a conversation I’m miles away from. I’ve lived here most of my life, and I, literally, know every single person in this town, but they see me as Grandma Dee’s granddaughter, Mark Chadwick’s daughter, Beck’s cousin, Aunt Lottie and Uncle Rich’s niece. I’m the girl who took second at the state competition in breakaway roping my senior year of high school and then quit rodeo entirely and moved away to a big city. Oh, and I can’t have babies. That about sums me up for the town I have lived in most of my life. I’m too tired to try to show something more than that.
Beck laughs—an attempt to lighten the mood? I’m quick to make myself clear before she can play whatever hand it is she’s holding. “I’m not interested in hooking up with Reggie.”
“Hooking up?” Beck says, raising her microbladed eyebrows, which frame her eyelash extensions. For me, the hair and makeup was something I did for rodeo events. Beck is rodeo every day: full makeup, nails, big hair, and skin-tight Wranglers. My accusation offends her, and I’m okay with that because it means she’ll back off. “I’m talking about dinner with friends, Sienna, not hooking up with your ex. Forget I mentioned it.”
I don’t apologize for jumping to a conclusion. This pan is overscrubbed, so I finally rinse it and put it on the dishtowel. I pick up the next pan—used for the mashed potatoes, the dregs of which are now dried like concrete.
“Are you okay, CC?”
The nickname catches me off guard. I had thought “CC” was my real name until kindergarten. Even after I learned that CC was just a nickname Mom had made up when I was a baby—short for Sienna—I’d written CC on all my papers for school and it’s what everyone called me. In the fourth grade, Mrs. Cole made every student use their full name. Nate became Nathan. Kenzie became McKenzie. I became Sienna, and everyone seemed to forget that I’d ever had a nickname. Except Dad and, sometimes, Beck.
I don’t notice that my hands have stopped scrubbing until I feel the pressure of Beck’s hand on my forearm. I look from her acrylic nails painted to look like Easter eggs to the worry line between her eyebrows. “Things seem a little . . . off with you.”
The temptation to confide about my appointment strikes hard and hot in my chest. It would be such a relief not to hold this by myself, and if I told her one of my secrets I’d feel less guilty about keeping the other one, but the sensation lasts only for the time it takes me to remember that Beck doesn’t need anything else to worry about. Her husband, Clint, has been out on workman’s comp for three weeks after spraining his ankle at the jobsite. Beck’s been picking up extra shifts at the diner, where she’s worked just one shift a week since high school because she likes to see everyone and it puts cash in her pocket. Now her paycheck helps to cover bills. Their oldest son, Braeden, is five and on the autism spectrum. She’s been working for a year on getting him ready for mainstream kindergarten, which will start in the fall. Calypso is two, an absolute angel, but her speech is delayed, and even though Beck hasn’t said it out loud, that was the first clue with Braeden. The house Clint and Beck bought last summer needed a lot of work done on the yard, something they were waiting to tackle this spring, but with Clint’s injury they have a backyard of mud and sticker weeds right now. It would be nothing but mean to add one more worry to her shoulders. Especially since I don’t really know anything yet.
“I’m fine,” I say.
She scowls. “You’re lying to me.”
I’m surprised by her boldness. She’s never called me a liar before, but I am lying so it’s hard to be offended by the accusation. She thinks what I’m hiding has to do with Tyson, hence her dangling Reggie in front of me to draw out information. She knows about the infertility and my not liking city life.
“How’s Clint’s ankle?” I say, changing the subject rather pointedly. “Has the doctor given him a time line yet on when he can return to work?”
Braeden starts shrieking from the living room before Beck can challenge me. If another kid shrieked that way, adults would drop everything and run. For Braeden, though, it probably means that someone is standing in front of the TV or he’s waited too long to go to the bathroom.
Beck lets out a breath and hands me the dishtowel. I give her a sympathetic smile, and she smiles wanly in return—this is Braeden’s third meltdown of the night. He’s less and less comfortable with groups of people, and I see both the worry and the irritation in her eyes as she passes me. Everyone has their struggles, but I resist lining them up to see who has it worse. I’d give anything for Beck’s life, struggles and all.
I let Dad drive home even though we brought my car. I have the only Prius in town. Dad gets crap about it on a regular basis, but he’s admitted—out loud—that it’s a good run-around car. Forty-seven miles to the gallon versus his truck’s seventeen. When you live nine miles out of town, like we do, it makes sense to drive something efficient even if it does label you a flaming liberal around here. There’s a light snow falling as we pull away from the curb, but nothing is sticking on the roads. “In like a lion and out like a lamb” means nothing in Wyoming—we’ll have snow through April.
In 1988, Uncle Rich sold his portion of the Reynold family ranch to Grandma Dee and bought a house in town with the proceeds. As a kid, I was so jealous that Beck could ride her bike to the Burger Den—on sidewalks, if she wanted to—and play with other kids in her neighborhood any time she wanted. I, on the other hand, was stuck on the ranch, where the closest neighbor was two miles away and the only cement was for foundations and feeding troughs, not driveways and flower bed curbing. It was dang hard to learn how to ride a bike on a gravel driveway. Once I was a teenager, though, I loved living out of town. I could ride whenever I wanted to in any direction I chose and practice my growing rodeo skills in the arena Dad had fixed up for me. I watched sunsets without a single roofline to interfere with the view and woke to roosters crowing and cattle lowing. Dad bought me an old Mazda pickup once I got my license, and then I could go to town and grab a strawberry shake any time I wanted.
While we drive, Dad and I talk about Uncle Rich’s upcoming retirement and Malachi’s move. We go over the calving schedule, which I keep on my phone, and what we need to get done before they start dropping. When the conversation dwindles, I bring up Mom—I’ve been trying to find the right time for two days. “I’ve been thinking about her today,” I admit. “Birthdays kind of do that to me.” I don’t like that I couldn’t answer Dr. Sheffield’s questions about Mom’s cancer. I want those answers when I get my results—which will likely happen tomorrow, since it didn’t happen today. “See,” I could say to Dr. Sheffield. “I’m a responsible adult and I will advocate for my health!”
Dad is quiet as he stares out the windshield, where tiny flecks of snow are beading into water on the glass. He turns on the windshield wipers. “The day you were born was the best day of our lives,” he says softly. He doesn’t say that the worst day of his life came two years later when Mom died, but I know he’s thinking it. There is tragic beauty in how much he still loves her after all these years. He never remarried, never even dated much. Once Mom was gone, his focus became my happiness, my security, my opportunity. I appreciate it, but sometimes it feels like an awful lot of pressure.
“Do you remember what kind of cancer she had?”
“She had breast cancer, CC, you know that.”
“I know she had breast cancer,” I say, adding a light laugh as though Dad’s teasing me. The laugh doesn’t sound right, but I hope I’m the only one who notices. I adjust the heater in the car so that it’s blowing more on our feet instead of our faces. I like to think my fiddling adds a casual topcoat to my questions. “But what kind of breast cancer?”
“Are there different kinds?”
I laugh again. This one sounds more natural. “You are such a man. There are lots of different kinds of breast cancer. Some are genetic, others aren’t.”
“I hope you’re not worried about catching it,” he says.
I swallow as he slows down for the stop sign at the turn onto Beer Can Road. God bless Wyoming.
He puts on his blinker to signal a right-hand turn. There isn’t another car in sight. “Mom’s cancer was a fluke, sweetheart. A one-in-a-million case. You don’t have anything to worry about.”
I am forced to expound my reasons with more lies I’ve planned out in case this very thing happened. “I was listening to a podcast about knowing your medical history, and it got me thinking that I should probably know more about mine, that’s all.” The only podcasts I listen to are about the beef industry . . . and that one about fixing broken marriages. “Knowing what kind Mom had, or if there were other cases of cancer in Mom’s family, would be good info for me to have.”
Dad turns right, and we leave the city lights of Lusk—such as they are—behind us. “Your mom wouldn’t want you to worry yourself about any of that. The day she was diagnosed, we both fell apart and then she lifted her chin and wiped her eyes and said, ‘Well, enough of that. We’ve got some time to make the most of, Mark. Let’s get to it.’” He smiles wistfully.
I’ve heard this part of the story before, but I want more.
“How did you guys get the diagnosis?”
“What?”
I’d given permission to get my results over the phone. I couldn’t go to Cheyenne to get them in person. “I mean, did you go into the doctor’s office or did they, uh, call you with the results of the biopsy?” Was I there when they got the news? Did my mom look into my eyes as she learned the truth? How long was it before they knew Mom was terminal? She died so quickly after the diagnosis—what treatments were available?
“I don’t remember,” Dad says. “Sorry.”
I turn to look at his profile. He doesn’t remember? I’d heard him talk about where he was when 9/11 happened—driving to a stock sale—and when the Challenger space shuttle exploded—in Mr. Baddley’s history class, watching the launch on TV. But then maybe he’s blocked out the stuff surrounding Mom’s diagnosis. PTSD or something.
“Do you remember what stage her cancer was? And what treatments she had?”
Dad lets out an aggravated breath, the same kind of sigh that accompanied helping me with my math homework or me arguing for a later curfew when I was in high school. “She was terminal when she was diagnosed.”
“So, she didn’t have any treatment? No chemo or anything?” A billboard on Highway 20 says 98 percent of women survive breast cancer. It would have been different twenty-three years ago, but they would have tried something to extend her life even if they couldn’t save it. Right? Larry Shriver, the postmaster, has been on chemo for three years now, buying as much time as he can in hopes of seeing his youngest son graduate from high school in a couple of months. He is badly swollen and walks with a cane now that the cancer is in his bones, but he is going to see his boy in a cap and gown. Surely there would have been some options for Mom. I resist the idea of picturing myself with a cane like Larry—98 percent.
“I really don’t think you should worry about this stuff.”
“Dad,” I say, with forced calm. “Both of my parents have had cancer. One of them died from it. I think it’s—”
“And one of them didn’t,” Dad cuts in, snappy and pointed.
Heat churns up in my chest. “Are you serious? You don’t think my medical history is something I ought to know?”
Dad’s tone rises equal to my own, and I’m as surprised by his not backing down as I am about my pushing him. “Like I said, your mom’s stuff was a fluke, and since you don’t have a prostate, my stuff doesn’t factor. Haven’t we had a hard-enough year without getting into all that?”
A year that is about to get a whole lot harder, I think. “What if there’s something I can do to minimize my risk, Dad?” This is disingenuous. I might have cancer right now, this minute. I picture myself telling him outright, “Dad, I might have cancer. I need to know what kind Mom had in order to get a sense of how big this could be for me.”
Every potential response to saying something like that is disastrous. I can’t tell him any more than I could tell Beck when she tried to figure out what I was hiding less than an hour ago. Dad didn’t tell me about his cancer until he’d already done the first round of radiation and had decided to have the surgery—weeks after his initial diagnosis.
“I want to know about Mom’s cancer,” I say bluntly. “I’m sorry that’s upsetting. I don’t want to hurt you, but I need to know these things.”
Dad leans back in his seat as if he’s trying to strike a casual position. When he talks, the sharpness is gone but the tension lingers, and he can’t quite evoke the softness I suspect he wants me to hear. Then again, maybe it’s my own tension I’m feeling, residue left behind by the lies I’ve been telling and the secrets I’ve been keeping.
“Look, CC,” Dad says, his tone still lecturing, which keeps me on edge. I’m never on edge with Dad; this whole conversation is so not us. “You’re young and healthy and eat lots of fish. If you want to find things to worry about, try Syria or contaminated water. Or . . .” He gets excited. “Gun rights! We can always use more women in the battle for the constitutional right to bear arms.” He starts telling me about an article he’s just read about the bills being drafted for next year’s legislative session.
I am stunned by this blatant dismissal. When I go to Dad with problems I need help with—whether it was long division, how to fix the hinge on the cattle gate, or how to tell Grandma Dee that I wasn’t waiting until after my twentieth birthday to get married—he talks it out with me and then helps me. He went with me to the principal after I told him that some of the boys in my class were saying naughty things to the girls at recess. He took me prom dress shopping in Utah when Grandma Dee refused to waste her time on “frilly crap that doesn’t matter a lick in the grand scheme of things.” He spent hours teaching me the finer points of roping and bought me two goats the year I decided I wanted to start competing in goat roping for rodeo. Over the last few years, he’s sent me links to articles on infertility, and he’s the only one who knows that Tyson expected me to join him in London three months ago and I’ve barely talked to my husband since I told him a week before my flight that I wasn’t going. I’ve always trusted that Dad will be there for me when I need him because he always has been. Maybe I’m misunderstanding this. Maybe all the tension is warping my interpretation of what’s happening here.
The gravel crunches beneath the tires of the Prius when Dad turns onto our road, a half-mile driveway that forks at the end. Veer right to park in front of the ranch house—built by Grandpa Reynold back in the forties—or veer left and head to the outbuildings: the big barn, the little barn, the cabin where the hired hands stay, and the equipment shed I spent three full weeks reorganizing back in February. Dad goes right and stops in front of the house as he finishes his diatribe about gun control.
I’m still off balance, trying to determine whether he’s acting strange or I’m interpreting it wrong, but I still need the information, so I count to three before I go back to the topic he’s trying to avoid. “I get that this is hard for you, Dad, but it’s really important to me. For me. Do you have medical records or receipts I could look through? Maybe the name of Mom’s doctor or the clinic or something—a relative on Mom’s side I can call to get a family medical history?” I pause to take a breath. “I only need your help to get started. Then I’ll see it through on my own.” Saying this out loud emphasizes how important it is. I need to know about Mom’s cancer. I deserve to know.
Seconds tick by. Dad and I stare out the windshield from our respective seats, watching the snowflakes turn to water droplets and slide down the glass. They start small, then get pulled into another drop as though they’re magnetized. Doubling their size makes them heavier, and they slide into another drop and another until the drop is so heavy it streaks down the glass, leaving a swath of drop-free glass in its wake.
Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you.
I hold my breath, literally and metaphorically, until Dad turns to look at me. I meet his eyes and exhale as normally as I can. The expression of concern on his face brings emotion up in my throat. The biopsy could come back negative and he’ll never have to know how bound up I feel right now. He’ll think back on this night and be uncomfortable with how pushy I’m being but not know why I’m breaking out of our usual style of communication to press him so hard about something he obviously does not want to talk about.
“I’m sorry, CC,” Dad says softly. “I didn’t keep any of that stuff. Between moving back here and not wanting reminders of what was the worst time of my life, I wasn’t thinking about you needing any of it later on.”
The worst time of his life.
“How about a name.” I sound as if I’m ignoring the pain signals he’s sending out. I guess I am. “A cousin or someone I can call.”
“They don’t know.” Mom’s mom was a drunk and her dad was already dead by the time she had me.
“If any of Mom’s relatives have had breast cancer, that’s important for me to know. If you give me a name, I can find them on Facebook or something.” I’ve never actually had to find anyone before, but other people do it all the time, right?
He shakes his head and laughs without humor. “You’re making too much of this, Sienna. Your mom’s doctor said that Mom’s cancer was a fluke.”
“Twenty-three years ago,” I remind him. “We know a lot more now than we did back then. What was her doctor’s name?”
“I don’t remember.”
“The clinic?”
Dad shakes his head. “There’s no one to track down, CC. Your mom was the end of her line, and her cancer doesn’t have anything to do with you.” He smiles, and even though I’ve never doubted a single smile from him in all my life, I doubt this one. Dad reaches over to tuck my hair behind my ear. “I’m sorry I don’t have anything for you on this, but I guess you’re just going to have to trust me. This isn’t something you need to worry about, okay? Let it go.” He opens the door and steps out of the car.
The tension that follows us inside the house keeps us subtly avoiding each other for the rest of the evening. Neither of us asks the other if we want to watch an episode of NCIS, our current Netflix binge show. Dad heads into the office; I do the dishes left in the sink from breakfast and lunch and try to think of other ways I can approach this. I’ve asked after family members, medical paperwork, Mom’s doctor and clinic. What other means do I have to find any answers?
Once I’m ready to call it a night, I go into the office long enough to tell Dad good night and give him a quick kiss on the cheek. He says good night back without looking up from the blog he’s working on about freeze branding. He’s blogging three times a week now, selling ad space and steadily growing his readership. I’m impressed by his success with the ranch’s online presence, but it’s clear he’s using it to hide from me tonight. I don’t think that’s fair, and yet if he really doesn’t have any information for me, it’s silly for me to feel mad or hurt or whatever it is I’m feeling. With so many complications in my life right now, I don’t want my relationship with him to be complicated.
“Love you, Daddy,” I say. “Thanks for a great birthday.”
The reminder that this is my birthday breaks down the cold war that’s been growing between us. He stands up and gives me a good hug, then kisses my forehead, a genuine smile on his face. “You are the greatest gift in my life, CC.” He taps me on the nose. “Love you too.”
I feel better to have cleared the air between us. It’s not until I’ve brushed and flossed and pulled the covers up to my chin that I realize Dad didn’t give me the twenty-fifth birthday letter I’ve been expecting from Mom.
A little rush of . . . something moves through me, leaving a tingle behind as it radiates from the center of my chest out through my fingers and toes. I’ve been getting birthday letters since I was eight years old—not every year, but always on the significant ones. My tenth birthday because I was now in double digits, my thirteenth because I was a teenager. I had letters on my sixteenth, eighteenth, and then twenty-first birthdays too. I was sure I’d get one this year because I’m a quarter of a century.
Did Dad not give me the letter because he’s put out with me? Is he planning to give it to me tomorrow morning instead? Did he forget?
Or are the letters done?
The thought makes my heart race. I’ve asked Dad before how many letters there are and when I will get them. He always winks and smiles and tells me it’s a surprise. Would Mom have written letters only up through my twenty-first birthday? If so, why hadn’t she said, “This is the last letter, dearest Sienna.”
But I’m relieved, right? I’ve been dreading this letter I expected to be full of advice meant for a different version of myself than who I have turned out to be. I’ve been bracing myself to feel ashamed and guilty for all I am not. I even imagined not opening this one at all, and instead hiding it away until I felt ready.
So why do I feel tears prick my eyes at the thought that I might never read my mom’s words again? Maybe anything she says is better than nothing. Maybe I need to feel that connection to her right now more than I ever have before.
What I wouldn’t give for a letter that says, “To my dearest Sienna on the day of her first cancer diagnosis.”