Someone To Watch Over Me

“For me to help you.”

“Mom—”

“Girls will lean on you…you’ll let them. But who’ll take care of you? Have to be me.”

He brought her hand to his lips and kissed it. “Whatever you say, Mom.”

The dog started to make this pathetic, whining, crying sound that drove Jax absolutely crazy.

Take it like a man, Romeo, Jax wanted to say. He hadn’t cried in years. Probably not since his father died.

“Want you to know…no regrets,” she said. “Except not more time…with you and the girls. With my grandchildren. I wanted a dozen. But even that…doesn’t sting the way it used to. No regrets…important to be able to say when you’re where I am. I want you to be able to say it, too. No regrets.”

“I’ll say it now,” he claimed. “I don’t have any.”

He lived his life exactly the way he wanted, and it suited him just fine.

“You don’t even know,” his mother said.

“Know what?”

“What’s really important. You need to make some changes, Jax. It’s time.”

“What do you want me to do?” he asked, because he’d promise her anything and he hated so much to think that she was disappointed in him in any way.

“Believe.”

“Believe in what?”

“Love.”

“I love you,” he said. “I love Kimmie and Kathie and Katie.”

“You’ll get it right. In time,” she said, moving from one subject to another, as she tended to do of late. “I know you will.”

“Get what right?”

“Try not to miss me too much. And don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”

No, she wouldn’t. She’d be gone. He didn’t care what she believed, what she thought she’d seen. There was nothing else. She’d be nothing.

“One more thing,” she whispered, her lips barely moving, the words slurring together. “One more favor.”

“Anything,” he said.

“Left you a job to take care of. In my will.”

“Okay. I will. Promise.”

“You know? Doesn’t really hurt anymore,” she said, and for a moment it was as if someone had taken the weight of the world off her emaciated body, eased all the stress lines on her face and put some color back into her cheeks. “Doesn’t hurt at all.”

“Good.” He sure didn’t want her to hurt.

“Billy,” she said, the faintest of smiles on her face.

That was his father’s name.

It was the last word she said.

She died with a smile on her face and his dead father’s name on her lips, Jax’s hand in one of hers, and the other buried in the dog’s fur.

Jax froze for a moment, staring at the quilt over her chest, willing it to rise and fall as she took more air into her lungs. But nothing happened. There was no more of the wheezing, labored sound of her struggling for one more breath, that hideous, hideous sound.

Romeo seemed to know what had happened. He looked at Jax, as if to say, Do something!

“I can’t,” Jax said. “I already did too much bringing her here, and she signed all the papers weeks ago.”

No one was coming to try to make her breathe again or get her heart going. Her choice, and he’d accepted it. No one would do anything.

Romeo whimpered pitifully. He licked her face frantically for a moment, until Jax got up and pulled him off. Romeo growled and showed his teeth. Jax swore and said, “She’s gone. Let her be.”

He thought for a minute, the two of them might go at it, right there in his mother’s room, and he wouldn’t have minded that. He was up for a good brawl right now. But all the fight went out of the dog. It was like his whole face just fell. He curled back up next to Jax’s mom, his snout laid over her chest, and started whimpering again. Jax sat back down in his chair and buried his face against her other shoulder, because he still needed to touch her, to not let go yet.

A nurse came in sometime later to check on her, halted in the doorway at the sight of him and the dog leaning over her.

“Go away,” Jax said, glancing at her briefly, and then pressing his face against his mother’s shoulder again.

“I…Is she gone?”

“Just go away,” Jax yelled.

Another nurse came in twenty minutes later, asking if she could do anything, if he’d like her to call anyone.

“Just go away,” Jax said again.

The girls would be mad that he hadn’t called, but what was the point? It was the middle of the night, and none of them had slept in days, and he’d screwed up and brought his mother here and sent the girls home.

“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” he said to no one but the dog.

Romeo whined, as if he agreed for once with something Jax said.

“And it wasn’t supposed to happen yet,” he yelled.

Romeo frowned, then laid his head back down on Jax’s mother’s chest, the two of them in complete accord. Neither one of them wanted to do anything but sit here and hang on to her and pretend she wasn’t gone.

Chapter Two

Jax and the dog stayed until morning came and with it Jax’s three sisters. Katie, the oldest, was twenty-seven, part owner of her own mortgage-finance company and a junior real estate mogul. She wore crisp, no-nonsense power suits with matching pumps, never a hair out of place, and she arrived issuing orders as usual.