Tom crouched beside me.
“Her legs don’t listen to her brain,” he said calmly. “But she can beat you at cards.”
The girl laughed. “No, she can’t.”
That girl was Mia.
My first real friend.
Tom had a way of stepping into awkward moments and softening them.
When I was about ten, I found a chair in the garage with yarn taped to the back, clumsily braided.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he muttered. “Don’t touch it.”
That night he sat behind me on the bed, hands trembling.
“Hold still,” he said, trying to braid my hair.
It looked terrible.
But I thought my heart would explode.
When I hit puberty, he came into my room holding a plastic bag and looking incredibly uncomfortable.
“I bought… stuff,” he said while staring at the ceiling.
Inside were pads, deodorant, and cheap mascara.
“You watched YouTube,” I guessed.
He grimaced. “Those girls talk very fast.”
We never had much money, but I never felt like a burden.
He washed my hair in the kitchen sink, one hand supporting my neck while he poured warm water with the other.
“It’s okay,” he’d say quietly. “I got you.”
Sometimes I cried because I’d never dance or simply stand in a crowd.
He’d sit beside me, jaw tight.
“You’re not less,” he’d say firmly. “You hear me? You’re not less.”
By my teenage years it was clear there would be no miracle cure.
Most of my life happened inside my room.
Tom turned that room into a whole world.
Shelves within reach. A strange tablet stand he welded together in the garage. On my twenty-first birthday he built a planter box by the window and filled it with herbs.
“So you can grow that basil you yell at on cooking shows,” he said.
I burst into tears.
“Jesus, Emily,” he said nervously. “You hate basil?”
“It’s perfect,” I cried.
He turned away awkwardly. “Yeah… well, try not to kill it.”
Then he started getting tired.
At first it was small things—moving slower, sitting halfway up the stairs to catch his breath, burning dinner.
“I’m fine,” he insisted. “Just getting old.”
He was fifty-three.
Mrs. Rodriguez finally cornered him in the driveway.
“You see a doctor,” she ordered. “Don’t be stubborn.”
Between her pressure and my begging, he went.
After the tests, he sat at the kitchen table with papers under his hand.
“What did they say?” I asked.
He stared past me.
“Stage four,” he said quietly. “It’s everywhere.”
“How long?” I whispered.
He shrugged. “They said numbers. I stopped listening.”
He tried to keep things normal.