Say You'll Be Nine

Aplastic anemia, most likely caused by the CMV virus. So far, the doctors had tried blood transfusions and immunosuppressants, but they weren’t working well enough. They wanted to do a bone marrow transplant. The good news was, as his identical twin, I was definitely a match. The bad news was, it would end up costing us a minimum of ten grand.

We didn’t have ten grand.

My mother’s version of hand-wringing was clicking the end of a click-top pen. Over and over and over again. Which meant I was going to have to kill her at some point.

“You okay, Pooh Bear?” she asked Jackson. From the date of his diagnosis to now, she’d reverted to treating us both like we were five.

“Mom,” Jackson said with a sigh. “It’s fine.”

Click, click, click.

Jacks shot me a look. Make it stop.

“Mom, why don’t we go grab some lunch? Jackson said he’s desperate for sushi today.”

Her head snapped toward me. “He can’t have raw fish. If he got food poisoning…”

I reached for her arm. “I know. That’s why we’re getting the cooked stuff and veggie sushi. There’s a place right down the street.”

Mom shot another look at her poor, pitiful baby laid up in the hospital bed. I couldn’t blame her. It wasn’t fun to see him like this. He’d lost a lot of weight and looked pale and weak. It was a striking contrast to the tan, muscled guy he’d been only two years before.

“All right,” Mom said on a sigh. “I guess I could go for a California roll myself.”

It was the only roll she knew. She liked to call it by name to sound cool, like she was a trendy, young hipster who ate sushi like the rest of us.

She didn’t. She ate the California roll and six pieces of ebi, cooked shrimp that may as well have been hibachi shrimp on the plate, cooked for her by a performance chef. Which, let’s be honest, she’d prefer.

As we walked out of the hospital, she dug in her purse for her pen so she could click her way down the street. “Ten thousand dollars,” she muttered. “They might as well have said a hundred thousand.”

“Not true. Between the three of us, we can come up with it.”

“I could kill your father.”

“Me too.” Not that I wanted to start this conversation again. There was no point to it. What was done was done. The man had fucked us all over time and time again, despite having fucked us over the first time by leaving years and years ago. Little had we known, he’d taken copies of our birth certificates and social security cards to use as a financial credit free-for-all. It had left all three of us not only broker than shit, but also in the credit score basement. Meaning… we couldn’t get a medical loan, and we didn’t have credit cards.

I held the door open for her and followed her across the parking lot to our car.

Mom was still clicking. “They said he can get another couple of blood transfusions to give us time to save up. Six months maybe.”

“Yeah.” I opened the door for her and closed it once she was settled. I didn’t trust her not to accidentally shut her long skirt in the door and drag it down E. Colfax Avenue. “I’ve got some things in the works with potential sponsors, but if it doesn’t work out…”

I didn’t want to say it out loud, but it was time to face facts.

“I meant to tell you I got my job at Bolt’s back.”

“Oh honey. I hate that you have to give up the Instagram thing to bartend again,” she said. “But maybe Bolt would let me take some of your shifts in addition to—”

“No.” Not only no, but hell no. Our mother already worked her ass off at a med spa doing laser hair removal. In our tiny town of Caswell, Colorado, it was considered a good-paying job. And it was. But after losing her house and car to her asshole deadbeat ex-husband, the money didn’t go as far as it used to. Now she had a car payment on an older Prius and rent on her own damned house that was now owned by a real estate investor.

I chose not to correct her when she called my social media company an “Instagram thing” because I knew she didn’t fully understand social media content and the concept of influencers. Jackson did. I’d created plenty of content for the website of the coffee shop and bakery he owned with his best friend, Marchie. They’d gone through a sales slump when a diner opened up nearby, so I’d talked them into letting me take over their social media channels for a little while to help. It had really worked, enough that they’d started paying me to keep me on long after the sales slump was over. Now it was an effort not to spend more time on their accounts than my own, since theirs was a paying job with a steady income while mine was just a wing and a prayer at this point.