“This is why you’re my hero and everybody else’s, too,” I told him.
Dad waved me off. “I ain’t nobody special. Now tell me about this man you texting slow.”
“It’s…I don’t know. I mean, maybe it’s something. But I don’t know what.”
My father raised his eyebrows. “You bringing Mr. I Don’t Know home to meet me? You can sleep in your old room and we can put him in the back house.”
Dad was making the same request as Rhys. And something rippled in my stomach at the thought of bringing The Fine Prince home to meet my father. Fear? Excitement? I couldn’t figure out which.
“He’s White by the way,” I let my father know.
Dad’s lips thinned, but then he took my hand in his. “Used to be unimaginable to bring a boy outside your race home to meet your daddy. But the world’s changing. Even Missouri. Bring him home. Let me meet him, and I’ll tell you if he’s worth you knowing for sure.”
“Alright, Dad, deal,” I agreed with a soft smile. I picked back up the phone with my free hand. “I’ll text him right now and see if he can—”
I never finished that sentence. I cut off when my father gripped my hand tight. Too tight.
“Daddy, what’s wrong?” I asked.
Then I screamed when he suddenly pitched forward.
And that was my last regret. Screaming instead of immediately jumping into action. Maybe if I’d called 9-1-1 and started chest compressions just a few seconds earlier things would have gone differently.
Maybe if I’d been looking at him instead of at my phone, I would have registered that my dad really wasn’t alright.
But that wasn’t what happened.
I didn’t do anything I should have done from the start of our conversation. And less than an hour later, he was dead on arrival, the victim of a massive coronary attack.
He never got to meet Mr. I Don’t Know.
And the next morning I woke up to a text from the guy we’d been talking about when Dad died. “Hello, Cynda. Found your glass slipper—also known as a Dansko. You should come straight here when you return on Monday and The Fine Prince will put it directly on your foot.”
He was just asking for me to make fun of him for referring to himself in the third person and by his 90s-licious nickname.
But all I felt was rage. And grief. And….and….
“I think you’re scared. Scared of getting close. Scared of intimacy.”
Forget Rhys and English-accented analysis. He didn’t get it. Didn’t understand me. He still had two parents. And a crazy-ass sister, and a brother, too. And though he hadn’t talked much about his family, English boarding school didn’t exactly scream “I grew up not rich.”
He didn’t get it. Didn’t understand what it was like to have someone you loved ripped away, just like that. To be all alone.
Plus, the twins needed me. Just like they’d needed Dad. And Rhys only liked me for the same reason all guys liked me. Because I was a pretty bitch who could never be caught. What was that one Taylor Swift line about being a nightmare disguised as daydream?
Well, I guessed it was time to teach him that life lesson.
Wiping away tears, I texted him back, “Not feeling St. Louis anymore. Have decided to stay here. Maybe make up with Ingrid. Best of luck.”
Then I blocked his number so that I wouldn’t have to answer any follow-up questions.
Chapter Twelve
A break-up text. The subject of much lore and countless Medium articles.
Not the nicest thing to do, I’ll admit. But my father was gone and the twins needed me. Under the circumstances, ghosting out had been all I could manage.
However, against all odds Rhys had ended up here in Guadalajara. Sleeping separate from me in the back house, just like my churchgoing father had wanted. He was also helping me make the twins’ dreams come true via his rent check.
And now he’s in the back seat of my Honda, holding Mavis up to keep the fluid in her chest at the bottom of her lungs and her airway as free as possible while she struggled to breathe.
We screech to a stop in front of the hospital less than forty-five minutes, door-to-door. Record time. But was it good enough? Mavis lost consciousness again on the drive over. And though she still had a pulse, it was extremely weak.
I stand by helplessly as a team of orderlies dressed in face shields and full protective gear pull Mavis on to a gurney. Rhys gives the admitting nurse further instructions, but it sounds like they’ve got oxygen waiting in a sealed off room. Also, the hospital’s one ventilator is on standby. Thank goodness.
But then that’s it. We can’t go any further on Mavis’s journey. We’ve been too exposed to safely enter the hospital with her.
There’s nothing left to do but leave and wait to see if she makes it.