Second Chance Summer by Morgan Matson Page B

you know… talk about it?”
    My father nodded, even as he grimaced slightly. “Of course,” he said. “If you want to.”
    I felt a flare of anger then, as sudden and unexpected as if someone had set off a firecracker. “It’s not that I want to,” I said, hearing the sharpness of my tone, regretting it even as the words were spilling out of me. “It’s just that we’re all here, we’re all up here, and we’re not talking, or…” I seemed to run out of words and anger at the same time, and was left with only a sinking feeling in my stomach, since I knew that the last thing I should be doing was yelling at my father. I started to take a breath, to apologize, when my father nodded.
    “We will talk,” he said. He looked away from me, straight into the screened-in porch, as though he could see the time in the future when this would be happening. “We’ll say… all the things that we need to say.” I suddenly found myself swallowing hard, fighting the feeling that I was on the verge of tears. “But for now, while we still can, I just want to have a little bit of a normal summer with all of you. Sound good?” I nodded. “Good. The defense rests.”
    I smiled at that—he used the legal expression whenever he wanted to declare a subject closed—but I couldn’t push away thequestion I’d had ever since he’d been diagnosed, the question that I somehow never felt I could ask. “I just…”
    My father raised his eyebrows, and I could see that he already looked better than he had a few minutes earlier. And if I hadn’t known, if I hadn’t seen it, I might have been able to pretend that it hadn’t happened, that he was still fine. “What is it, kid?”
    I felt myself smile at that, even though I still felt like I might start crying. This was my dad’s name for me, and only me. Gelsey was always “princess,” Warren was “son.” And I had always been his kid.
    As I looked back at him, I wasn’t sure I could ask it, the thing that I’d been wondering the most since he’d told us, sitting at the head of the dining room table. Because it was a question that went against everything I’d always believed about my father. He was the one who checked for burglars when my mother was sure she heard a noise outside, the one we yelled for when confronted with a spider. The one who used to pick me up and carry me when I got too tired to walk. The one I’d believed could vanquish dragons and closet-dwelling monsters. But I had to know, and I wasn’t sure I’d get another chance to ask. “Are you scared?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper. But I could tell from the way that his face seemed to crumple a bit that he had heard me.
    He didn’t say anything, just nodded, up and down one time.
    I nodded as well. “Me too,” I said. He gave me another sad smile, and we sat there together in silence.
    The shuttle bus rumbled up the street and passed our driveway, coming to a stop in front of the house next to ours, the CUT TO: SUMMER house. A dark-haired girl in an all-white tennis outfit got out, looking, even from this distance, fairly disgruntled as she stomped off the bus and up her driveway, soon obscured by the trees that separated our houses.
    “Was that it?” he asked, after the girl had disappeared from view and the shuttle bus had moved on.
    “That’s it,” I said. Then he’d reached out and ruffled my hair, resting his hand on the top of my head. And though we were certainly not a touchy-feely family, without even thinking about it, I leaned closer to my father, and he wrapped his arm around my shoulders, pulling me into a hug. And we stayed like that for just a moment before we both moved apart, almost at the same time, as though we’d agreed upon it beforehand. I slid out of the driver’s side, opening the back door to retrieve my bag, the bakery box full of unfortunate cookies, and the Henson’s Produce bag, which my father let me take.
    We were heading up the steps to the house, my