Previously

Candace stormed past the nurse’s station and knocked the heavy-set male orderly aside with one blow and burst through the doors cussing and accusing the doctors of allowing Bette to remain in pain for so long just because she was a lesbian.

“Straight women get shots and pills, all kinds of things to dull the pain.”

Security was on their way down to remove Candace from the delivery room and the building by the time Kit started screaming, “Candace, calm down, please.”

There was a chorus going on in the room, everyone shouting and yelling, Candace lunging at the doctor, one small nurse crouching in the corner with a scalpel in her hand for protection, while the other nurse stood in the middle of all the mayhem, waving her arms.

Bette, calm now, looked down into her son’s newborn face, and seeing that child, barely three minutes old, eyes wide open and laughing, everything else dropped away.

Bette smiled at the memory.

Chapter 4

Bette walked in and placed her hands on Marcus’s shoulders. To see the woman who has been apart of her life for the last twenty-five years lying there hopeless, ate at her.

“How is she?” she asked.

Marcus reached up and grabbed both his mother’s hands and squeezed them.

“The doctors don’t think she’s going to make it to the end of the week,” he responded.

Somehow this wasn’t a surprise to Bette. Candace had prepared Bette for this moment since her diagnosis some time ago. Lung cancer is what was eating at her partner. Cancer was taking the woman she loved away from her. Cancer was leaving her alone again. Candace went on with the radiation treatment when she was first diagnosed and after that there were no more cancers cells spotted.

Bette, Marcus, and Ashlia were all overjoyed with this news. But being a child of a cancer patient, Candace knew differently. A few months later after her scheduled check-up, they were signs of the cancer spreading to the brain. The x-ray showed four tumors.

Candace had refuse radiation treatment that time, stated that the radiation treatment will only prolong her life not save it.

“Were is your sister.” Bette asked Marcus, as she walked around the chair and sat on the edge of the bed.