To My Romeo, with Love novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Nine Days

My father found the needles on Sunday morning.

I had left the sharps box on the bathroom counter, bright red, with the biohazard sticker on the lid.

Dale Pinkney was fifty-eight years old, and he had spent thirty years fixing city buses.

He knew a warning label when he saw one.

I came out of my room and he was standing in the hallway in his sock feet, holding the box in both hands.

"Laurel," he said. "What is this?"

I had practiced this in the mirror for six days.

None of the practice came out.

"Dad, sit down."

"I don't want to sit."

"Please."

He put the box down on the hall table very carefully.

His face had already gone gray around the mouth.

My mother had once sat us both down on the same couch, in the same hall light.

"I have lymphoma," I said. "Hodgkin. It's in my neck and my chest. It's stage two, and the doctor says it's very curable. She said eighty-five to ninety percent."

He didn't say anything.

"I start chemo next week. There's a thing I have to do first, for my eggs, so that's the shots. I wasn't hiding them because of the shots. I was hiding them because."

I ran out of sentence.

My father looked at me for a long moment.

Then he turned around and walked down the hall, through the kitchen and out the back door.

I heard the garage door slide up.

I stood in the hall with my hand over my mouth.

I knew this walk.

I had watched him make it for four years after my mother died.

I gave him ten minutes, then I put on my slippers and went out after him.

He was standing at his workbench with both hands flat on a half-sanded pine board.

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