Asher: A Second Chance Novel by Kylie Walker Read Free Book Online Page A

his campaign. It’s all for show as usual.”
    Asher nodded. He understood the whole ‘keeping up’ thing. His own parents had been guilty of it for years too. Each time one of the neighbours remodelled, they did. The neighbours got a pool, they got a bigger one. The one good thing that came out of his mother’s illness had made them realize there were a lot more important things than money to him and his mom anyway. His father didn’t seem to find anything important any longer if it wasn’t seventy-proof. “Did you ask her about eating with us? Mom hasn’t been feeling well enough to cook, but our house keeper, Maribel makes a mean turkey.” Lily had always cooked their holiday dinners but this year she was smack dab in the middle of her chemo and she just didn’t have the energy for it.
    Mia nodded. “I asked her. That’s really what has me so upset. She got all dramatic about it and told me I was choosing your family over ours. She tried to drag Travis into it and she wanted him to tell me I was ruining his holiday by choosing not to go to the club.”
    Asher already knew the answer only because he knew his friend so well, but he asked anyways, “So what did Travis say?”
    Mia smiled. “He asked me, in front of my mother, if I could finagle him an invite too.”
    Asher laughed. “He knows he doesn’t need an invitation. Sometimes I think my mom likes him more than me.”
    “Your mother doesn’t like anyone more than you,” Mia said with a smile.
    Mia had been helping Asher and his mom over the past couple of months. When Lily had a treatment and they weren’t in school, Asher and Mia would take her to the clinic and would sit with her for the four hours it took. They played board games with her or watched movies. Mia and Lily had gotten close. When Lily’s hair had started falling out, Mia had bought her a wig and even threatened to shave her own head. Lily had laughed and then suddenly sobered and said, ‘You better be kidding! I won’t be responsible for all that gorgeous hair being lost.’
    “You run a close second to me,” he said. “And then Travis and then my dad.”
    Mia cautiously asked, “Has your dad been home this week?”
    Asher shrugged. “He’s been there as much as he ever is lately but he’s worthless to my mother. Sometimes when mom is sick at night from the chemo and I go in to help her to the bathroom he is laying right next to her passed out from being stinking drunk and he doesn’t even hear her calling out for help. I locked her meds up too.”
    “Why?” Mia asked, alarmed. “Was there a problem with the nurses?” Lily had hired two nurses that rotated shifts when Asher was at school or wanted to go out. They had also brought in a hospital bed and shower chair and other equipment to keep her comfortable. She’d had a port installed in her chest where they gave her all the injectable medications. Asher was her primary caregiver when the nurses weren’t there in the evenings and on the weekends. He had learned a lot about cancer and medications. A lot more than any 17 year old should know.
    “No, the nurses are great. It’s my father. She asked him to give her a pain pill the other night when the nurse left early and it was a couple hours before I came home. I got there and found her in excruciating pain. Her head hurt so badly she said she couldn’t even see straight. Which was strange because the pills would take the edge off. I had just picked up her prescriptions that morning and the old pain pills had one left. When I opened the cabinet, there was still one pill in that bottle. So I counted the new bottle. Those hadn’t been touched either. There was a bottle of Ibuprofen in there too. That one was missing a pill. When I confronted him he said that he hated how the morphine made her ‘out of it.’ We got into a fight about her being ‘out of it’ versus being in pain to the point of not being able to tolerate it any longer. He had probably already drunk