Axis

august 4th

         THE WORST PART ABOUT unexpectedly being stripped away from your home to live with your aunt, who’s practically on her own since her husband isn’t home the majority of the time due to his highly dangerous job for the military?

        The constant guilt you feel about all the money she has to spend on you; money she doesn’t really have a whole lot of to begin with.

        I think it goes without saying that spending the latter half of my afternoon researching colleges and their yearly tuition fees online was not my finest idea.

        I’m not going to sugarcoat it and say Aunt Colleen and Uncle Bill are well off, nor am I going to dramatize it and say that they’re dirt poor. No, they fall somewhere in the middle. Which, for a family of three with plenty of years ahead of them to start saving up for their five-year-old son’s college tuition, that’s a pretty comfortable position to be in.

        But when your soon-to-be college-bound seventeen-year-old niece suddenly becomes a factor in the equation, things get a little messy.

        When my mom died, she left only half of her inheritance to Colleen, her sister. But the other half, she gave to my dad, since he was the one who had custody over me in those last few months. Which, in retrospect, only made things worse.

        If I’m being honest here, I don’t think my mom ever truly fell out of love with my dad. Even though he had a knack for letting her down time and time again, she kept handing out second chances like loose change in her pocket. You’d think leaving her to deal with her pregnancy alone at only twenty-years-old would have been enough of a warning for his character.

        Yeah, well, apparently that wasn’t the case.

        Starting from when I was six, she had roped him into agreeing to hang out with me for a few hours once a month every month, hoping that spending time with his daughter would make him realize his mistake and give the whole family thing a shot. She thought that he’d fall in love with his one and only daughter just by getting to know her and seeing what she’s like. And I’m sure for a lot of guys out there, that would have been enough.

        Not my dad.

        Sure, he agreed to do it, but more often than not, he’d just take me to get lunch somewhere, maybe spend a little while at the park, and then he’d ask if I had any friends in the area whose apartment he could drop me off at for a bit while he “ran some errands.” I wouldn’t see him for a few hours, and then he’d come to pick me up and explain to me what crazy stories we would share with my mom about our day once I was reunited with her.

        I was young, but I wasn’t stupid. It was painfully evident that my mom thrived off of those false recollections that I made up after each visit. I already knew that my dad had no intention of being the proper father figure that all my other friends had, and the last thing I wanted to do was let my mom down.

        And so I rolled with it. After all, it was only one day out of the month that I had to give up. Just twelve times per year pretending like I had a dad who I was excited to spend time with. I could handle it.

        But then my mom collapsed that one fateful September day when I was nine, and that’s when things suddenly weren’t okay.

        As it turned out, she knew about the fact that she had pancreatic cancer months before I was ever clued in on the secret. When she spent long hours at the grocery store, only to return with a jug of milk and a few other necessities, she was really at the hospital being CAT scanned. When she went to meet up with her friends, she was really meeting with her doctor to discuss the next steps she should take with the prospect of death hovering over her shoulder.