“What is with you?”
I glanced over at my dad as I pulled into the hospital’s parking garage, my wipers pushing away the drops from the cold fall rain that was pouring onto the windshield. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, you’re singing along to the radio and smiling. You almost look perky. What the hell is that about?”
Am I?I shrugged. “It’s a gorgeous fall day and I’m in a good mood, that’s all.”
That wasn’t all.
I was a total liar.
Ifeltperky, and Iwasperky, because in addition to the great time I’d had with Connor the night before, we had plans for the weekend.
For a date.
He’d texted me after I got home last night, officially asking me out on the date, and as if that wasn’t swoony enough—I mean, he had a whole event planned that he wasn’t letting me inon—we texted about nonsensical bullshit for a couple hours until I finally had to bail for sleep.
Hell, yes, I was freaking perky.
We’d hung out twice and I was still outside of the zone.
When we got to CT, my brothers were already there, waiting for us.
“What, Duff didn’t get you coffee on the way?” Joey said to my dad as he hugged him. “I would’ve gotten you coffee if I was driving.”
“He didn’t want any,” I replied, giving Joey the stink eye.
“You know your sister, always in a hurry,” my dad said, totally throwing me under the bus.
I scowled at him. “Yousaidyou didn’t want me to stop.”
“Because you scare me,” he said with a straight face, which made me roll my eyes before going over to check him in at the desk.
I handed over his insurance card and signed the forms, even though I knew nothing about what I was doing. One of these days I was going to have to do some research, because this assumption that my dad had everything covered was probably not the way to go.
But what did I know? I’d had insurance through my job for a few months now, and I had zero knowledge of co-pays and in-network physicians.
God, I needed to adult-up.
I heard Joey laugh with my dad and felt marginally better—at least I wasn’t alone. My brothers might’ve been huge pains in the asses, but they showed up for every appointment. They distracted my dad with stupid jokes and sports talk and made everything feel less serious than it actually was.
But it was serious.
My dad’s lungs were shit.Interstitial lung diseasewas what the pulmonologist was calling it after years of my dad just waving a hand every time he got winded and saying he’d smoked too much in the ’80s. He’d been able to deal with it up until the last few years, but now supplemental oxygen was in play (which he hated), as well as a slew of medications we’d been trying out.
But the lung damage was irreversible and none of us was exactly sure what that meant long-term.
It felt like we were all too scared to ask the question ofhow long.
But as soon as they took my dad back for his chest scan, suddenly I was under the microscope.
And not about my dad’s health.
“So what happened with Cunningham the other night?” Matty asked while we all sat in the waiting area.
Ty said, “Dad told me it was a one-and-done, but he also said you seem annoyingly perky all of a sudden and I saw online that you and Dale met him for coffee. So what gives?”
“I’m not annoyingly perky,” I said, and something about the fact my dad assumed it was aone-and-donefelt mildly insulting.