Ugh. She was the last person I wanted in this room. My mom had no place here.
“Maybe. That’s what you want me to do, live life with no regret?”
His eyes drifted closed and his grip loosened on my arm. My heart started thudding. Every time his eyes closed, I wondered if they would ever open again.
“I want you to call me Dad. I never got that, never was brave enough to ask, but I want you to think of me as your dad. That’s all I want.”
Fuck me. I couldn’t think, couldn’t get my heart rate under control. I needed a carton of cigarettes and a handle of cheap tequila to get through this. I wanted to get up and go outside for a few minutes and pull my shit together, but that wasn’t time I would get back with him.
“Phil … Dad. Jesus, you were the one that raised me. All Mom and that asshole did was try and beat me down, try and shove me in a box that was too small. You’re the only parent I’ve ever known, and it doesn’t matter what I called you.”
“But ‘Dad’ sounds nice. It was the only thing I ever really wanted from you.”
His choppy breathing evened out some and I noticed his mouth go a little slack under his mask. His chest was still rising and falling, so I assumed he’d just drifted off, and flopped back in the chair. This was brutal. I didn’t know how I was going to come out on the other side of it not fundamentally changed.
I got up and went to the kitchen to see if I could find a beer or something stronger. I was leaning on the counter, had my head hung down, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to cry or break everything I could get my hands on. This was too much emotion, too many feelings for one person to try and work through. They were getting all tangled up, too engulfing, and I felt like I was going to suffocate on all of them.
I don’t know how long I stood like that, how long I just had to tell myself to keep breathing. At some point there was a knock on the door, and I realized it was really late and I had been zoned out for a long time.
It was around midnight, no one should be here, but my friends didn’t really play by common rules and Rule had a sixth sense when stuff was going down with me, so I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he was doing a spot check. I rolled my neck around on stiff shoulders until there was a nasty-sounding crack and wandered over to the front door. I pulled it open without a second thought and almost fell on my ass when a soft body launched into mine as soon as there was enough room for her to fit through.
My arms closed reflexively around her tiny waist as hers went up around my neck. She buried her nose in my throat and her endless waves of red hair curled all around my arms and hands. I felt moisture on her face as she rubbed her cheek against the edge of my rough jaw. She didn’t say anything, just held me tight and cried, for me, for her, for us, and I just stood there dumbfounded and unsure. I knew one thing: if she tried to walk away again I wasn’t going to just let her go. I would love her too hard, hold on too tight … just like Phil said.
“Saint?”
Her arms squeezed even tighter around my neck and she pulled back so we were eye to eye. That gray was glittering silver and clear through the sheen of tears. She was the prettiest and most welcome thing I had ever seen.
“Nash, oh my God …” She bit her lip and grabbed my face. “I’m so sorry.”
I lifted an eyebrow and reached up to circle my fingers around her delicate wrists.
“I know, I got your text. I just don’t know what you’re sorry for.”
She blinked at me and I saw her struggle to put her thoughts in line. She was cute when she was awkward.
“Mostly I’m sorry for not having faith in you, and in myself. I really do love myself, Nash. I think it took looking at a life lived alone and in fear to realize that. I think maybe you kicked the door open and I couldn’t hide from it anymore. I have a lot to offer and I totally deserve the best kind of love. I deserve your love.”
All those pieces of my heart that I thought she took with her, she reached in and put back in a better, more resilient way.
“You deserve anything and everything you ever wanted, Saint.”
She smiled at me but it was shy and kind of nervous. “The thing I’ve wanted the longest besides getting to be a nurse … is you. I am so fucking in love with you right back, Nash Donovan.”
I scooped her up in a rib-crushing hug that made her squeak. I kissed her so hard that I’m surprised it didn’t hurt one of us. When I put her down I dragged her inside the house and shut the door.
“What are you doing here, though?” I didn’t know why she was at my dad’s so late. Not that I wasn’t relieved to see her. Just by being her, she made some of the stuff I was drowning in feel less oppressive.
“I went to Phoenix to see my mom. I was hurt and acting like a panicked schoolgirl. I wasn’t thinking, wasn’t listening, and I thought the space would help. We had a heart-to-heart, Mom and me, and I realized that I can’t keep looking at myself through any eyes but my own. We all make mistakes, say hurtful things off the cuff, but that doesn’t define who we are. I was coming home when Royal called me. She ran into Cora and heard Phil wasn’t doing very well. I broke every speed limit that exists between New Mexico and here. I would never have forgiven myself if you had to do this alone.”
God, I just loved her.
“I need you.” My voice cracked when I said it, and the feelings I was treading through just to keep my head above them started to rise up again.
“I know you do, and I need to be here for you. That’s how love works.” She reached for my hand and gave it a squeeze. “How is he?”
I shook my head and let it fall forward. She curled a hand around the back of my neck and brushed a kiss across the stubbly ridge of my cheek.
“Getting worse by the day. I haven’t left his side very much. He drifts in and out, forgets where he is, what time in his life it is. The nurses seem to think it’s only a matter of days, if not hours.”
She pulled me closer and I let myself sort of fold into her embrace. Her hair was so soft and she smelled like spring and sunshine even though it was the middle of the night.
“I’m sorry. This has to be awful. Can I do anything for you?”
I kissed her behind the ear and felt her shiver against me. “This is it. Unless you want to relent and go get me a pack of smokes and some booze.”
She pulled back and gave me a scowl. I grinned at her.
“I’m just kidding. Just having you here makes it suck less. I’m so glad you can finally see how wonderful you are.”
“Well, I might have moments here or there still, so be patient with me, but I realize that if someone as great, as talented, as caring as you can be in love with me, then I must be pretty special.”
The only answer I had to that was to kiss her again. At another time, in any other place, I would have found the nearest place I could just lose myself inside her, but as happy as I was that she was here, that she was officially mine, I still had other pressing matters on hand. I sighed against her lips and closed my eyes.
“I have to stay with Phil. I can’t be somewhere else if he goes.”
She sighed back and we were just breathing each other in and out.
“I’m not going anywhere, Nash. If you’re here, then so am I.”
I wanted to argue with her. I wasn’t exactly keen on the idea of her seeing me such a mess and so vulnerable, but I had to admit having her around to lean on sounded nice. I gulped and led her back to the room Phil was in. She put a hand to her mouth and I saw her fingers shake. A glossy coating of fresh tears sprang into those heartbreaking eyes, but she shook it off and broke away from me to walk over to the bedside. Her eyes were everywhere and she touched his wrist with delicate fingers. I realized belatedly as I slumped into the recliner that she was doing her nurse thing. She stood there for a long minute and then turned back to me with a devastated expression. I went to get up so I could get another chair, but she put herself firmly in my lap and curled up so that she was cradled against my chest.
&n
bsp; “His pulse is really weak, thready; respiration’s shallow and labored.”
“Yeah.”
She shook her head. “I’m so sorry.”
I snorted a little and kissed her on the crown of her head. “You keep saying that.”
“Because I really, really am.”
I pulled her as close to me as I could and watched my dad with a hollow feeling in my gut.
“I know you are. He told me not to live a life of regret tonight. He also told me to love you so hard there would be no getting away from it, and then he asked me to call him Dad.”
My voice broke, and for the first time since this all started, everything I was feeling started to leak out. Luckily it was dark and the only one who could tell was Saint. Moisture forced its way out of one eye and got lost in her bright hair.
She put her palm on my heart and tapped her fingers in time with the hasty beat.
“You can do all those things for him.” Her voice was soft and gentle like she was scared she might spook me.
“Now that you’re here, I can.”
We stayed silent after that, just held each other in the dark and waited to see what the next day would hold. I knew that whatever it was, we would face it together and that made facing the inevitable slightly more bearable.
Phil was in and out the next day. Sometimes he knew exactly who I was and he kept grinning at me and looking at Saint. I urged her to go home, told her she didn’t have to stay since she had already missed work, but she wasn’t budging. She fluttered around, doing her nursing thing, doing her girlfriend thing, and I was grateful for it all. Phil made her laugh when he was awake and lucid. He told her broken tales of my misspent youth with Jet and the Archer twins, which led to a show-and-tell of all my awful tattoos that I had since covered with other things. He didn’t last long, and she was amazing with him even when I felt useless and at a loss.
I had a really hard time when he drifted off, when he thought he was somewhere else in a different time. I wanted to hurt things when he mumbled things about my mom and that disastrous relationship. It made all the disdain I had for her bubble to the surface and all that old hurt and those feelings of inferiority percolate and stew. Saint did a good job of reminding me that my mother’s opinion held no weight for me anymore, and that the people that mattered in my life adored who I was and they wouldn’t change a thing about me. That she wouldn’t change a single thing about me.
It was early the following morning, really early, the sun wasn’t even up yet, when something changed. I was napping on and off in the recliner, Saint was asleep on the couch in the other room, but something in the air shifted and my eyes popped open. I got up and walked to the side of my dad’s bed and looked down at him. His eyes were at half-mast and I could see, literally see, that he was fighting, struggling to inhale each breath he was taking. My heart slipped out of rhythm and I knew, just had a gut sense, that this was it. That last grain of sand in the hourglass was falling down.
“Hey.” I could only whisper and his eyes flickered in my direction.
I couldn’t tell if he could see me anymore, if he could tell who I was at this point, but he lifted a frail hand and I took it in my own. Emotion clogged my throat as I saw his skeletal-looking chest take longer and longer to rise and fall. His bony fingers curved over my own and I don’t know if he really said it or I just wanted him to say it, but I could swear that the words with you always floated out and around us before his eyes drifted shut one last time.
I don’t know how long I stood there, don’t know if I made any noise or not, but he wasn’t breathing anymore and I was just left holding his hand and staring down at him in numbness. I heard a strangled sound and looked up to see Saint hovering in the doorway, hands over her mouth and eyes huge in her face. She knew and she was aching for me.
She walked over and wrapped her arms around my waist from the back and we just stood there, silent and sorrowful, grieving and a little bit lost.
“I think he told me he would always be with me right before he passed.” I sounded rusty and unsure.
“He will always be with you, Nash. He’s a part of you in everything you do. He’s always going to be here looking out for you.” I felt one of her fingertips trail over the ridges of my spine, where my dragon was sleeping and at rest.
“Yeah, but it’s not going to be the same without him.”
Her soft breath fluttered across the back of my neck as I linked a hand over hers where it was lying on my stomach.
“No, it won’t, but you’ll do your best to make his memory live on.”
Damn straight I would. It was the least I could do after everything Phil had done for not only me, but the rest of the wayward souls I called my family.
The next few days were chaos. I felt like I was the eye of a storm that raged around me. Saint got down to business before the sun even came up. She made the arrangements for his body to go where it needed to and to be handled in the way Phil’s last wishes asked for. In a matter of hours Phil’s condo was full of people. The girls all banded together to work on the funeral arrangements. Since Phil was going to be cremated, a viewing was set up for a few days from the day he passed. I had lost the ability to speak, to interact, and was just responding when spoken to, so it was up to Saint to run the show. My girl who was shy, hesitant, and nervous, took charge just like she did in the ER and I couldn’t have loved her any more if I tried. I could tell my friends noticed the way she rallied for me, propped me up, and they all fell a little in love with her as well. There was no doing any of this without her.
The guys were all tasked with alerting everyone of Phil’s passing. Phones were constantly going off, questions and answers were flying; one day faded into the next and I was in the center of it all, mostly numb and unresponsive. At some point I think Rule noticed my comatose state, and while there was a lot of business and details that still had to be handled, celebrating Phil’s life and the wonderful person he was definitely needed to be first on the agenda, so he asked Rome to put together a wake at the Bar on the fly. We were Donovans after all, so it was only fitting.
It was sometime into my third Jameson and Coke, with Saint propped up against my side while the Pogues played “Waltzing Matilda” and “If I Should Fall from Grace with God” on the jukebox, while everyone told sloppy sad stories about how Phil had impacted their life, that the chill and unresponsiveness finally started to fade. I was sad, I was lonely, I was scared, but more than any of that, I was determined to do my old man proud, and that was what he would want me to focus on.
I pulled Saint close to me. I kissed her on the end of her freckled nose and told her, “Thank you.”
She wrinkled her brows up at me. “For what?”
For everything, but that didn’t really cut it. “For being you.”
Her eyes got all shiny and bright silver like they tended to do when I said something that got to the heart of her, and she hugged me so hard I couldn’t breathe. I let go, told Phil good-bye in my head, and raised a toast that had everyone hooting and hollering at the top of their lungs. It was a rousing send-off, a proper way to say farewell. All of the people Phil had touched, the family he had helped build, honored his memory and each other while getting properly sauced and living life with no regret.
The viewing was the next day. The girls had found a nice little church close to downtown and it was almost filled to capacity. Phil had a legion of friends he rode motorcycles with, old navy buddies—including Cora’s dad, who was holding baby Remy, a bunch of lifelong clients, and enough ex-girlfriends and lovers that all I could do was shake my head and high five the guy in my head.
All of the gang were standing outside greeting people as they walked in. It was an odd sight, all of us that were normally so colorful and bright dressed in shades of black and gray. Even Rule’s hair was a somber, solid black for the occasion. I loved that they all wanted to surround me, that I had a bunch of arms ready to hold me up if I was going to fall, but I felt prett
y solid as long as Saint didn’t wander too far from my side. She was the rock I needed to stay grounded to here and now.
From inside the church, Johnny Cash’s version of “Danny Boy” started to play and I was subjected to a backbreaking round of man hugs, and heartbreaking hugs and kisses from the girls. Cora was openly crying already and I had only ever seen her do that when she was pregnant and when Rome got shot. Rule’s winter eyes also looked a little glassy and sharp, but he buried his face on top of Shaw’s head to hide it as they walked inside.
I clasped Saint’s hand and brought it up to my lips so I could kiss her knuckles.
“Ready?”
She opened her mouth to say something but snapped it shut again with a frown when the sound of high heels on cement suddenly interrupted us. I couldn’t believe she was here or that she had the nerve to bring him. I scowled at both of them.
“What are you doing here?” There was no hiding the bite in my tone.
My mom cleared her throat. “Really, Nashville, how would it look if we weren’t here?”
Seriously? I felt my back teeth snap together.
“I don’t care how it looks. This is a time for Phil’s family, the people that loved him. You made your choice and it wasn’t either of us, so you can just go.”
I felt Saint’s fingers curl around my elbow.
“You’re being ridiculous.” To my mother I always was.
I opened my mouth to retort when Grant decided he was going to jump into the conversation.
“You always were a selfish brat. Now move out of the way before someone comes out and walks into this scene. Stop being undignified … if you can manage it.”
I saw red. I was going to rip his throat out. I was going to break his nose. I was going to … pull my outraged girlfriend back because she stepped in front of me and jabbed the tip of her finger right in the center of Grant’s tie. It was rare to see her get so heated, so I took a step forward to put a hand on her shoulder just to keep her steady.