Free The Last Days of Rabbit Hayes by Anna McPartlin Page A

away. He knew if he cried in front of his daughter his wife would find out and kick him. He couldn’t stay. He had to go. He needed to do something.
Oh, Rabbit, if only
. . . ‘Anybody want anything?’ he asked.
    Juliet looked into her mother’s eyes and brushed her eyebrows with a finger.
    ‘It will be no time before school ends,’ Juliet said, ‘and then we’ll be free to do what we want.’
    Rabbit nodded. Jack saw that she was fighting the urge to sleep.
    ‘It’s OK, Ma,’ Juliet said. ‘Go back to sleep – it’s getting late anyway.’
    Rabbit’s eyes rolled back and she was gone before Juliet said, ‘I love you.’
    Jack practically ran out of the room. He felt awful about making an excuse to leave his granddaughter alone with her mother. She didn’t seem to mind, though. Of everyone bar Molly, she was the most comfortable around Rabbit. He walked down the hospice corridor and, instead of finding Davey, Molly and Grace, he turned right into the prayer room. Molly was still so angry with him and he with her, and the kids were going through enough without their parents picking at one another. He knew it was unreasonable to blame Molly for Rabbit’s condition, but he couldn’t help himself. He relied on her to sort things out – he always had. They’d had a silent pact since the day they married. He’d provide for them and she’d protect them. She was a shit-kicker, his missus, and it was one of the things he loved and honoured most about her. He could be a gentleman because his wife was no lady and it had worked for them for more than forty years; but now, when he needed her to take them over the top, she was laying down her arms.
Why, Molly, why?
Jack was angry with her for conceding defeat, with himself for being weak and, worse, with Rabbit for threatening to leave them.
    Jack had boxed as a young man but he hadn’t hit anyone in forty-one years and never outside a ring. He wanted to box something or someone. He wanted to kick, punch and pummel, and he wanted to be kicked, punched and pummelled. He yearned for black eyes and swollen lips, cracked ribs and burst knuckles. That kind of pain he could tolerate, but not the gnawing heartache that manifested as a constant, dull, crushing pain, which threatened to take his breath away but never quite did.
This must be what it feels like to drown
.
    He looked around the room, at the blue, yellow and red stained glass, at the painting of Jesus on the cross, at the table, covered with a white linen cloth, that served as the altar and at the heavy iron cross that stood on it. The room was painted cream and the lights were set to dim. He was sitting on one of twenty wooden chairs. He’d been to many prayer rooms in his day, mostly with Johnny. It was impossible to sit there without being transported back in time.
    The room he remembered best was bigger and filled with statues. Johnny liked to call them by name and he’d talk to them as though they were old friends; sometimes when he was angry he treated them more like enemies. Johnny once told the statue of Padre Pio to go fuck himself, and Jack still blushed at the boy’s suggestion for the Virgin Mary. Now he couldn’t enter a prayer room or pass a church without thinking of Johnny.
God is good, Jack
, he’d said time and time again.
The poor deluded bastard
, Jack often thought, but he kept his reservations to himself. He had often listened to that boy talk about God and the next life, but he wasn’t sure if he’d believed in God even back then, and he was definitely sure he didn’t believe in God now.
Rabbit was right
. The kid was always suspicious of the religion she was born into. When she was five, she’d told her teacher that she didn’t like the God in the Old Testament because He was really mean, and the New Testament was horrible because it made her cry. Why would a father send his son to earth to be killed in such a disgusting way? How does that save anyone? she’d ask, stumping her