Axel
He sat in his truck in the hospital parking lot, where he’d driven without any memory of deciding to, for the better part of an hour, and cried the way he had not cried since he was a boy. His hands shook so hard against the wheel that he took them off it and pressed them flat against his thighs.
He had never once seen his father cry. Not at his grandmother’s funeral, not in the long silent stretch with his mother, not at any point in a marriage that had been its own slow death, thirty years wide. His father had simply gone quieter and quieter, folding the grief down smaller until there was nothing left of it to see. Axel had spent the last six weeks doing the same. He had called it respect. It had been the same inherited cowardice under a more reasonable name.
He called Marcus first, not because he had anything coherent to say but because his hands needed something to do.
“She’s sick,” he said, when Marcus picked up, his voice cracking on the second word. “Georgia. She’s — it’s cancer. It’s bad. I’ve known for five minutes and I don’t know what to do with any of it.”
Marcus didn’t say much. He never did, when it mattered, and Axel had always trusted that about him. “Go to her,” Marcus said finally. “Whatever you’re about to talk yourself out of doing, don’t. I’ll cover the shop as long as you need.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to say to her.”
“You’ll know when you’re standing there. You always do.” A pause. “Axel. Go.”
Everybody has something to lose, he had told her, the first night, when she said it was easy for him to talk about not wasting time. He had believed it when he said it. It was different, this, with his face in his hands. It cost something.
He looked down at the tattoo on his forearm. The person he loved had faced the largest thing that had ever happened to her alone, because he had decided that respecting her choice and abandoning her were the same thing.
They were not the same thing.
He splashed water on his face in the hospital lobby restroom before he got back in the truck and then he drove to the Harmon Suites without stopping anywhere else, without calling ahead, without giving himself a single mile of highway in which to talk himself back out of it.