We stayed like that for a while. Patricia in the chair. David crouching in front of her. Me standing against the wall with my arms crossed. A nurse walked past and looked at us and kept walking.
“I was worried about his stomach,” Patricia whispered after a long time. “You know I was. I asked Sarah in the car to make sure the doctor looked at it properly. I asked you, David, on the phone. Didn’t I? I said, make sure they check it.”
“I know you did, Mom,” David said. “That’s why the jokes hurt even more.”
Patricia wiped her cheeks with her tissue.
“You knew something was wrong,” David said. “You knew he was scared. You drove him to the doctor. And then you sat at that table and laughed at the exact thing he was scared of.”
“I didn’t think of it like that.”
“I know you didn’t. That’s the problem.”
“Please,” Patricia said. “Please, David. Please let me see him.”
David glanced toward Oliver’s door.
He was quiet for a long moment.
“Not until he wants to,” he said.
Patricia started crying harder. Not quietly. The way she must have cried in her kitchen that day, with Oliver standing in the hallway listening.
“You’re shutting me out,” she said. “My grandson is sick, and you’re shutting me out. After everything. After your father. I’m alone, David. I’m all alone in that house. And you’re keeping me away from my own grandson when he might be…”
She couldn’t finish.
I saw it happen on David’s face. The thing I’d seen a hundred times in twelve years of marriage. The little flinch. The way his shoulders came up. The way he started to reach for her.
He’d been doing it his whole life. Since he was a chubby little boy crying in his bedroom at Christmas.
Then he stopped.
He took a breath.
He shook his head.
“Mom,” he said. “He’s the one who’s sick. This isn’t about making you feel better.”
Patricia lowered the card into her lap.
She looked at her son for a long time, like she was seeing someone she didn’t quite recognize.
She didn’t argue again.
After a while, she picked up the canvas grocery bag from the floor and held it out.
“His pajamas,” she said, in a small voice. “The rocket ones. And his crackers.”
I took the bag from her.
“Thank you, Patricia,” I said.
She nodded. She stood up. She held the yellow card against her chest with both hands.
“Can I keep this?” she said. “It’s mine. He made it for me.”
David looked at me. I nodded.
“Yes,” David said. “It’s yours.”
She walked away down the long hallway toward the elevators. She looked so small. Seventy years old, in yesterday’s blouse, holding a piece of yellow cardstock.
I’d been so angry at her all night. I was still angry.
But watching her walk away, I felt something else too. Something I didn’t want to feel.
Later that evening, David sat with Oliver while I went to get some water from the machine down the hall.
When I came back, I stopped in the doorway.
David was sitting on the edge of the bed. Oliver was propped up on his pillows in his rocket pajamas, with the goldfish crackers open on the tray table.
David was speaking softly.
“I should have listened,” he was saying, “when you told me Grandma’s jokes hurt. In the car. I should have listened, and I didn’t. I’m sorry, buddy.”
Oliver picked at Stomper’s missing eye with his fingernail.
“I didn’t want her to cry,” he said.
“I know.”
“Will she cry if I don’t want to see her?”
David thought about it. He didn’t rush. He didn’t say the easy thing.
“Maybe,” he said.
Oliver’s eyes went wide. Like he couldn’t believe his father had said it out loud.
David took his hand.
“Grown-ups are allowed to be sad, buddy,” he said. “It’s okay for Grandma to be sad. But it’s not your job to stop them. It’s never your job.”
“But then you’ll be sad,” Oliver said.
“I might be,” David said. “Sometimes. That’s not your job either.”
Oliver thought about that.
I could see him thinking. He has a little wrinkle that comes between his eyebrows when he’s working something out, like when he’s trying to sound out a long word. It was there now.
“Can I tell you,” he said slowly, “when someone makes me sad?”
“Every time,” David said. “Every single time. Even if it’s Grandma. Even if it’s me. Especially if it’s me.”
Oliver looked at him for a long time.
Then he leaned over sideways and put his head against his father’s chest.
David put his arms around him.
I stood in the doorway holding two paper cups of water and watched them.
And I realized that was the first time I’d ever seen my husband hold our son without looking over his shoulder toward his mother’s feelings.
The weeks that followed weren’t easy.
I won’t pretend they were.
The specialist, Dr. Kwan, was a tall, quiet man with a bow tie covered in tiny cartoon planets. He sat down on a rolling stool in Oliver’s room three days later, so that he was lower than Oliver, and he talked to Oliver first, before he talked to us.
“You’ve got a lump inside your tummy,” he told him. “Next to your kidney. Do you know what a kidney is?”
“It cleans your blood,” Oliver said. “And makes pee.”
Dr. Kwan raised his eyebrows. “That’s exactly right. Very good.”
“We learned it in science.”
“Well,” Dr. Kwan said, “this lump isn’t supposed to be there. It’s been growing, and that’s why your tummy got bigger, and that’s why it hurts. So we’re going to take it out. And then we’re going to give you some special medicine to make sure it doesn’t come back.”
Oliver looked down at his stomach.
“So my tummy wasn’t big because I’m fat?” he said.
The room went very quiet.
Dr. Kwan looked at me. Then back at Oliver. He took his time before he answered.
“No,” he said. “Your tummy got bigger because something was growing inside it that shouldn’t be. That’s not your fault, and it has nothing to do with how much cake you eat or anything like that. Okay? Nothing you did made this happen.”
Oliver nodded slowly.
He didn’t say anything else.
But that night, for the first time since the birthday dinner, he fell asleep with his hands down at his sides.
The growth was serious. Dr. Kwan explained it to David and me later, in a little room with a box of tissues on the table. It was a kind of tumor that happens mostly in young children. They’d caught it, he said, before it had spread very far. That was the good news. There was a lot of good news, actually, about this kind of tumor, if you had to have one.
But it was still cancer. That word was still in the room.
Oliver had surgery the following week. Four hours. David and I sat in the waiting room and didn’t speak. David held my hand so tightly my wedding ring left a mark.
When the surgeon came out and said, “It went well. We got all of it,” David put his face in his hands and cried. Loud. In front of the whole waiting room. He didn’t care who saw.
After the surgery came the treatment. Chemotherapy, every week for a while. Then every few weeks.
There were days when Oliver was tired. Days when he threw up in a pink plastic basin and then apologized to the nurse for making a mess. Days when he was frightened, and held my hand so hard during the needles that his fingernails left little moons in my skin.
And there were days when he was angry. Really angry. Angry about being in the hospital again. Angry about missing soccer. Angry about missing his friend Marcus’s birthday party, where there was going to be a magician.
One afternoon, he threw Gerald the Triceratops across the room and yelled, “I hate this! I hate it! I hate everything!”
Then he looked at me, scared, waiting to see if I’d be upset.
I picked Gerald up off the floor and handed him back.
“You’re allowed to hate it,” I said. “I hate it too.”
He looked surprised. Then, slowly, he started to laugh. And then he was crying, and laughing, and I was holding him, and we both said “I hate it” about twenty more times until it was mostly just funny.
His hair started falling out in the fourth week.
He found it on his pillow in the morning. Little clumps of brown. He held a piece of it in his hand and stared at it.
“Will I look weird?” he asked.
“You’ll look like you,” I said.
“Will people laugh?”
Click here to continue reading PART 6: My Mother In Law Mocked My Son In Front Of Everyone Until His Dad Asked One Question
