All the way to Penn Station, Zoey berated herself. She should have seen this coming. She should have paid more attention.
She boarded the train and began the long trek to upstate New York. Poughkeepsie, Albany, Schenectady . . . Her mom had kept saying, “I’m fine, Zee, I’m just tired.” She should have known. Of course, there’d been the stress when Zoey’s father was downsized, and that exhausting move to a smaller place. That flu, the one she kept saying she couldn’t seem to shake. The recurring backaches. Utica, Oneida, Syracuse . . . “I’ll be fine,” she’d said. And Zoey had let herself believe it. She was still beating herself up when her cab pulled up to the hospital where her mom had been rushed after collapsing suddenly at lunchtime that day, on the way to the car with two big bags of groceries. The hospital where they then put her mom through a battery of tests.
It wasn’t the flu, and her mom wasn’t going to be fine at all. She wasn’t just tired, and it wasn’t just stress. It was cancer, and her mother was dying. “Pancreatic, I’m afraid,” the doctor had said, “the kind that often seems to come out of nowhere.” Although nothing came out of nowhere, did it. “I should have known,” Zoey whispered. “I should have paid more attention.”
Zoey took a deep breath and stepped through the hospital’s big front entrance.
She found the room and slipped in through the half-open door, exchanged tight hugs and murmured words of comfort with her father, then took a chair by the bedside.
“Mom?” she whispered.
Her mother’s eyes stirred, then opened. “Sweetheart,” she said. She closed her eyes again, then opened them once more. “I shouldn’t have tried to carry so many groceries,” she said, and she gave a weak laugh.
Zoey smiled and felt her eyes sting. “Shhhh,” she said.
Her mom felt for her hand. “Zoey,” she said, her voice serious now. “I’ve always told you to be happy with what you have.”
“I know, Mom. And I am, really, I am.”
Her mom pulled her closer, her grip surprising Zoey in its strength. “Don’t.”
Zoey leaned in. “Don’t what, Mom?”
“Don’t, Zee. Don’t settle.”
“Shhhh,” said Zoey again. “Mom, you should save your strength.”
“Help me up,” said her mother as she struggled to a half-sitting position against the bed’s headboard. She took Zoey’s hand once more. “Listen to me,” she said. “Don’t be content with what you have. I love your father, and I love you, and I am not an unhappy woman.” She paused, whether searching for the next words or simply to rally the strength it took to complete the thought, Zoey couldn’t tell. “But there was so much more I meant to do.”
“Mom . . . ,” Zoey began.
“Now you hush,” said her mother, “and listen. I don’t want to die with regrets, Zee. Promise me you won’t live half your life. Live it all.”
“Mom,” Zoey said.
Her mother squeezed her hand so hard it hurt. “Promise me.”
Zoey’s vision blurred with tears. “I promise.”
Much to the surprise of all concerned (especially her doctors), the next morning Zoey’s mother was considerably stronger than the day before.
“Stable,” her father announced when Zoey came downstairs to her parents’ cramped little kitchen. “Not out of the woods, they were quick to point out. They don’t expect that to happen. But for the moment, anyhow, doing better than they thought.”
She and her dad took turns burning things in the kitchen, alternated shifts at the hospital, and talked deep into the night. Her mom mostly slept.
Through those long hours sitting by her mother’s bedside, Zoey had plenty of time to think. She kept returning to her conversation with Henry on Friday morning. When he asked her what was important to her, she came up with freedom, adventure, and beauty.
Now it occurred to her that maybe she’d left something off the list. Something big.
Why had she not spent more time with her parents, these last nine or ten years? Well, she’d been busy. She worked a solid eight or nine hours a day, often more, plus all the work she brought home with her to do at night. But for what, exactly? Where were those hours going? And if they weren’t going into building what was important to her, into feeding what mattered, then what was the point?
“That list is probably not complete,” Henry had said. “You’ll probably want to revise it, add to it.” He was right.
Freedom. Adventure. Beauty. Family.
On Sunday her dad bought her a bus ticket back to New York City, with a hands-on-his-heart pledge to call the instant anything changed. “We’re doing okay here for now. You should get back. You need to get busy.”
“Busy, Dad?” said Zoey. “Busy doing what?”
He gave her a long hug, then released her and planted a kiss on the top of her head. “Keeping your promise.”