I crossed to her immediately and covered her hand with mine. “Anything…you can tell me anything.”

  She gave me a weak smile, squeezed my hand with hers, and said, “This isn’t something you need to worry about yet. But when the time comes you should use hemorrhoid cream to remove bags under the eyes.”

  Dr. Gonzalez found me coming back from the cafeteria, my momma’s rocky road ice cream clutched to my chest. He pulled me into a consultation room and broke the news I’d already guessed.

  My mother was dying.

  She had cervical cancer. It was stage four. It had metastasized everywhere. He gave her six weeks. Hospice had been called, and they were on their way.

  She’d either ignored or confused the symptoms with menopause. He said she’d likely had symptoms for more than a year. I was not surprised that she’d disregarded her own pain. Her selflessness was her greatest strength and her most infuriating fault.

  When I was sixteen, she’d walked around on a broken foot for two weeks. She finally went to the doctor when I handcuffed her to Billy’s truck and drove her to the emergency room.

  After the chat with Dr. Gonzalez, I delivered my momma’s ice cream. Not long after that, the social worker for hospice arrived and spoke to us both. The entire experience was surreal.

  My mother ate her ice cream and chimed in every once in a while with, “Now, I don’t want anyone to go to any trouble on my account.”

  I could only stare at her. Words failed me. Thought and motor skills were also failing me.

  It was decided that she would be released tomorrow and given transport back to the house. We would be assigned a day and a night nurse who would help us care for her over the next six weeks or so.

  Six weeks.

  I stayed for the rest of the day. We chatted about my job and her coworker friends at the library. She asked me to break the news first to her boss, Ms. Macintyre. Momma felt confident that Ms. Macintyre would know what to do about the rest of the staff.

  I stumbled out of the hospital around 9:30 p.m. feeling exhausted and empty. My brain whispered to me as I walked to my car that the only thing I’d consumed that day was a triple-grande Americano at 7:00 a.m.

  I wasn’t hungry, though. I was the opposite of hungry, but neither full nor satiated.

  I slipped into the driver’s seat and stared unseeingly out the windshield, and was pulled from my trance by the sound of my cell phone ringing. I glanced at the caller ID. It was my friend Sandra, my best friend Sandra.

  Relief and a tangible feeling I couldn’t name seized my body, a pain so sharp that I gasped. It felt like the glass chamber that had surrounded me all day had finally shattered. I was suddenly breathing, and the air that filled my lungs hurt. The photo of Sandra’s smiling face on my phone blurred, or rather my vision blurred because I was crying. I swiped my thumb across the screen and brought the phone to my ear.

  “Hello?”

  “Ashley! Thank God, you answered. Marie and I need you to settle a debate. Which is worse: not having enough yarn to finish a sweater or discovering that the yarn you used for the sweater was mislabeled as cashmere and is actually one hundred percent acrylic?”

  My brain told me that it was Tuesday, which meant that back in Chicago where I lived and worked and had a lovely life reading books and enjoying my friends, it was knitting group night. Sandra, a pediatric psychiatrist with a pervy heart of gold, was in my knitting group, as was Marie.

  “Sandra….” My voice broke, and I rested my head against the steering wheel, tears falling messy and hot down my cheeks and neck and nose.

  “Oh! Oh, my darling….” Sandra’s voice emerged from the other end earnest and alarmed. “What’s going on? Are you okay? What happened? Who made you cry? Do I need to kill someone? Tell me what to do.”

  I sniffled, squeezed my eyes shut against the new wave of tears. “It’s my mother.” I pressed my lips together in an effort to control my voice, then took a shaky breath and said, “She’s dying.”

  “Your mother is dying?”

  “They’ve called hospice. She has stage four cervical cancer. It’s metastasized everywhere. She has six weeks….” I sobbed, almost dropping the phone and shaking my head against the new onslaught of tears.

  The other end was quiet for a beat. “Okay…where are you? I can be there by tomorrow.”

  I shook my head. “No.” I sniffed and wiped my hand under my nose then took a deep breath. “No, no. Don’t do that. I just…I just needed to tell someone. I’m leaving the hospital now.”

  “Are you in Knoxville?”

  “Sandra….” I covered my eyes with my hand and sighed. “You are not flying down here.”

  “Yes. I am flying down there.”

  “So am I!” I heard Elizabeth’s voice from the other end. Elizabeth was also in my knitting group and was an emergency department physician. She worked with both Sandra and me at the hospital in Chicago.

  Their threat to fly down to Tennessee sobered me, and I gathered a series of calming breaths before responding. “She’s at the hospital in Knoxville. They’re releasing her to home hospice tomorrow.”

  I related the rest of the facts surrounding my mother’s sudden hospital admission, how she hadn’t told anyone she was sick, how she’d ignored all the signs and symptoms until it was too late. Reciting the details calmed me. By the time I was finished, the tears had receded.

  “Oh, honey.” Sandra’s impossibly kind and empathetic voice soothed me from the other end of the line.

  “Tell her I found tickets,” Elizabeth said in the background. “We can leave first thing tomorrow.”

  A disbelieving laugh tumbled from my lips. “You can’t just drop everything and rush down here.”

  “Yes, we can. We’ll see you tomorrow.” I heard Sandra say, “I want the aisle seat.” It was muffled, as if she’d covered the phone with her hand.

  I heard a rustle and then Elizabeth’s voice was in my ear. She’d obviously commandeered the phone from Sandra. “Honey, listen. Sandra and I will be there tomorrow. Just text Sandra your home address. Don’t worry about anything. We’ll stay in a hotel and help you get your mother settled. Where are you going now? Is anyone there with you? One of your brothers?”

  “No. I’m on my way back to the house now to tell them the news.”

  Elizabeth tsked softly. “Oh, my dear friend, I wish we were already there. We would huddle hug and get drunk.”

  “Me too,” I admitted, grateful that there were people in the world who loved me. I didn’t have the strength to argue against their generous offer, so I simply said, “Thank you.”

  “No need for thanks. We’ll see you soon.”

  I nodded, and my eyes watered again as I clicked off the call, but I blinked the wetness away. I needed to pull myself together. I needed to tell six boys that their momma was dying, and I had no idea how they were going to take the news.

  After eight years with barely any contact, my brothers were basically strangers.

  Chapter Three

  “Death is a vey dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.”

  — W. Somerset Maugham

  I imagined that this was what Snow White must’ve felt like when she woke up in the presence of the seven dwarves.

  Seven hovering beards.

  Seven sets of bewildered eyes.

  Seven inquisitive expressions—partly suspicious, partly amused.

  The fainting was my fault.

  I drove home from the hospital in a daze. I walked to the front porch. Jethro came out of the house trailed by several others. I glanced over his shoulder. The world went black.

  I should have known better. I was a nurse for hootenanny’s sake! Two hours of sleep, no food, intense levels of stress; no wonder I passed out. I was lucky to have made it home without crashing my car. I’d never been in a position of forgetting to eat before.

  Now I was laid out on the couch in my momma’s house surrounded by a sea of beards. I heard the roosters in the back crowing up a fuss.

  My brothers’ expressions were varying degrees of anxious and curious. At last, my eyes settled on the measured, silvery blue stare of a stranger. My brain told me that this stranger’s name was Drew Runous, that he was a pillaging Viking highlander laird, and that earlier in the day he’d mentally pictured me getting my rub on.

  Drew was sitting next to where I lay on the couch, leaning over me, one arm braced to the side and his hand at my temple.

  That’s when the fuzzy-headedness began to retreat.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked him groggily, placing my hand to my forehead as I tried to sit upright.

  “Don’t do that.” He pushed my shoulders back to the couch. The hand at my temple moved to my wrist, his index and middle finger pressing against my pulse point. “You fainted. You need to take it slow.”

  “Listen to him, Ash. He’s a doctor.” I recognized the voice of my third brother. I turned to see sweet and anomalous Cletus just as he brushed a strand of hair from my face. He gazed at me with kind hazel eyes. “It’s good to see you, baby sister.”

  I gave him a small smile. I hadn’t seen him in eight years. An unexpected wave of nostalgia rushed over me. I ignored the tears stinging my eyes and responded, “You too, big brother.”

  “I’m not that kind of doctor,” Drew said quietly, and my attention moved back to him.

  “What?”

  His stern face and gray-blue gaze focused on me. “I’m not a medical doctor.”

  I blinked at him and his bewitching eyes. “Okay….”

  “But you said you was a doctor.” Cletus glanced between him and Jethro.

  “He is a doctor, just not that kind.” Jethro placed his hand on Cletus’s shoulder and spoke softly.

  “What kind?” Cletus asked.

  “He’s a PhD. It’s like being an expert in something. He doesn’t do the people medical stuff.”

  “I know what a PhD is,” Cletus mumbled.

  “Fine, you know what a PhD is,” Billy said to Cletus, but his stare was affixed to me. “What’s wrong with you, Ash? Are you sick? Did you see Momma?”

  I looked from Billy to Cletus to Jethro, and the events of the day—Get Well Soon balloons, the compassionate nurse at the hospital, rocky road ice cream, speaking with the social worker—crashed over me. I felt like I was being sucked into a vacuum cleaner. The world was eating me and screaming in my ears at the same time. I gasped, closed my eyes against the onslaught, and pressed my hand to my forehead.

  “Crap…”

  “What is it?” Jethro’s voice was closer. “What happened at the hospital?”

  I gathered a deep breath, held it within my lungs. When I was sure I wouldn’t cry, I released it and opened my eyes. They found Drew’s first. Inexplicably, maybe because he wasn’t family and my dislike for him still lingered, I discovered that the words didn’t strangle me as I spoke.

  “I saw Momma,” I said, “and I spoke to her doctor. She has cancer. It’s real bad.”

  A stunned quiet fell over the room like fluttering snowflakes blanketing a field. It was a soft silence, reverent, and the air felt cold and hollow. I didn’t see my brothers’ reactions because my attention was still fixed on the stranger hovering above me.

  Drew’s hand on my wrist gripped tighter, and his eyes flared with some emotion I didn’t have enough energy to decipher.

  I ignored all this and continued to address him as though he were the only person in the room. “The doctor is sending her home tomorrow with hospice. He says she’s got six weeks…or so.”

  “Six weeks….?” Jethro’s voice broke through my self-imposed trance, and my attention flickered to him. He turned away and walked to the recliner at the end of the couch. He sat down heavily, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. “Six weeks.”

  I glanced at the other five Winston boys. They appeared to be equally shocked and dismayed, and my gaze snagged on my youngest brother, Roscoe. The last time I’d seen him in person he was twelve. He was now twenty.

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” he said, glancing around the room as if it would give him answers. “How can she have cancer? She wasn’t even sick.”

  I had no words to offer, so I stared at the ceiling making a mental list of all the things I needed to do before she arrived the next day.

  “What can I do to help?” Drew’s voice, now gentle and solicitous, pulled me out of my head and back to the scene of quiet chaos in the living room.

  I shrugged and my vision blurred again with tears. They leaked from the corners of my eyes.

  “Pray,” I said, because it was the only thing anyone could do.

  I recognized the frustration etched in his features; it betrayed the helplessness he so obviously felt. However, the last thing I expected him to do was lean forward, hold my cheeks in his palms, and place a soft, lingering kiss on my forehead while his unwieldy beard tickled my nose.

  Therefore, when that was what Drew did, I was so astonished that I stopped crying.

  He retreated, his hands still cupping my face, and his thumbs wiping away my tears. Drew threaded the fingers of one hand through the hair at my temple and brushed it away from my shoulders. Then, bringing his palm back to my cheek, he said softly, “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  I stared at him bemused and not so far removed by the insanity of grief and low blood sugar to recognize that Drew was an odd possum. “Uh, okay.”

  Drew studied me, his gaze intent and as serious as a thundercloud. I watched him and imagined my expression mirrored that of a deer frozen in approaching headlights. His mouth hooked upward, though his eyes remained solemn.

  “Ash is short for Ashley….” I guessed he was speaking to himself, because it emerged as though he were voicing a secret or a private joke.

  So…still odd.

  My hands moved to where he continued to frame my face, and I wrapped my fingers around his much larger ones. “That’s right.” I nodded as I held him. “Ash is short for Ashley. Is Drew short for Andrew?”

  He blinked and looked startled. His hands stiffened, and he pulled them out of my grip, sitting straight for a short moment before standing. He was up, up, up, and away—tall like a tower or a great tree, or a mountain.

  Drew was no longer looking at me. In fact, he was looking everywhere but at me. Through my perplexed misery-riddled daze, I thought he might have been a smidge discomfited by his forward behavior. As it was, given the day’s events, his discomfiture and oddness made very little impact on my mental state.

  I watched numbly as he picked up a leather-bound notebook from the coffee table and turned to Beauford; he whispered something in the twin’s ear. Beau’s eyes, rimmed with shock and emotion, met mine, and he nodded. Beau moved from Drew, motioned to Duane, and crossed to me.

  “Okay, big sister, upsy daisy.” Beau leaned down and gave me a wobbly smile. Before I could comprehend what he was about, he lifted me in his arms like I was a feather. “You need food and sleep. Drew is fixin’ to cook you something good, and I’m carrying you to your room.”

  I opened my mouth to protest that I could walk, but Duane hushed me as he led the way upstairs. “Don’t worry about nothing. We’ll all be here when you wake up. You can boss us as much as you like in the morning.”

  Duane flipped on the light in my room and began straightening the bed, fluffing the pillow, and turning down the blanket. Beau set me on the floor next to the foot of the bed and wrapped me in his big arms.

  “We missed you, Ash.” His voice was watery, though I seriously doubted he would actually cry.

  Duane joined us and hugged me from behind. “I’m sorry I put maggots in your macaroni and cheese. I’ve wanted to tell you that for a long time.”

  Then Beau said, “And I’m sorry we used to hold you down and spit in your mouth.”

  “Ugh! Gross, Beau.” I gagged a little. “I’d forgotten about that.”

  The memories stirred something in me. The severity of the twins’ acts of torment was nothing in comparison to the frequency. They had launched volleys at me daily, hourly, whenever I was at home. I’d never thought of them as particularly lovable because my earliest memories involved their constant assaults.

  I tried to reach out to my brothers while I was in college to form some kind of sisterly bond with them on a more grown-up level. In return, they showed up at my dorm room stoned, behaved like criminals, and hid buckets of freshly slaughtered pigs’ feet in my friends’ rooms. It took weeks for us to find them all.

  I didn’t know what to think about all that now. I tsked and laughed at the absurdity of the moment, the apology for things that happened years ago, yet it wasn’t that absurd. Their wild behavior had kept us in limbo for eight years.

  Too tired to talk, I lifted my arms to hug my brothers. We stood together for several moments then Beau and Duane pulled away. Beau held my gaze—his eyes still glassy—then he took a step back.

  “You need anything, we’re right next door.”

  “That’s right, anything at all.” Duane put his hand on Beau’s shoulder. “But you might want to knock first.”

  He hadn’t meant it as a joke. It was a sober warning meant to save me from embarrassment. Too late.

  Beau closed his eyes, gave his head a subtle shake, and pushed Duane toward the door. “You’re a dummy.”

  “What? What did I say?” Duane said, glancing between his twin and me.

  “Just keep walking, dummy.” Beau’s eyes flickered to mine, apologetic and irritated, then he managed to guide his twin the rest of the way, closing the door behind them.

  I went through the motions of putting on my pajamas and brushing my hair, thinking about not much, but what I thought about was on the spin cycle, and it was making me dizzy. So I sat on my bed and stared into the mirror.

  I had bags under my eyes. In the morning, I would have to go hunting for hemorrhoid cream. Or I could just not care. I decided not to care.

  I heard a knock followed by my door creaking open.