Free Do They Wear High Heels in Heaven? by Erica Orloff

tears. “How bad? I mean…are you going to die? Is it that bad?”
    “I don’t think I’m going to die, no. I don’t plan on it. But I can’t promise. I mean, I could walk outside tomorrow and get hit by a bus.”
    “Sure. Like this is a high-speed bus zone, Mom.”
    “Anyone ever tell you that you’re very sarcastic?”
    “I wonder where I get it from?” she snapped. Then I heard her inhale deeply a few times. “I can’t believe this! It’s not fair. It’s not fair, Mom. Everything seemed to be going fine. Great. Track team this year, Justin, getting to go to Homecoming. Why do you have to have cancer? Why? What did this family do wrong? Huh? First, my father leaves us and doesn’t even bother to write or call us. He’s the world’s biggest dick…and now my mother gets cancer.”
    It was like a verbal slap, but I knew she was just venting what I felt. I could accept that life wasn’t fair. I mean, I’d been accepting it since I was Tara’s age. My mother refused to buy me Jordache jeans and insisted I wear Sears. Might as well hang a Social Reject sign on your kid. I told my mom it wasn’t fair and got the first of thousands of “Life isn’t fair, Lilianna Elizabeth.” Of course, I had rebelled against her and spent every spare dollar I got babysitting on cool clothes. But I didn’t imagine there were enough babysitting dollars in the world to level the playing field when it came to cancer.
    “I wish I had an answer, Tara. But if I go down that path, down the not-fair path, I’ll never get off of it. Life isn’t fair.” Christ, my mother emerged from my mouth again.
    “Please. Uncle Michael tells me that all the time.”
    “You should listen to him for a change.” I smiled.
    “Look, the rosary bead routine is fine for Noah, but I have a lot of questions for the Big Man Upstairs. Like why my mother? Why you? When everything seemed to be going so perfect?”
    With that, Tara dissolved into tears and flung herself at me, smudging her nails and not caring, crying and clinging to me. I held onto her, enjoying having her in my arms for this moment, smelling her hair, and feeling a surge of mother-love that only other mothers can understand. Michael has taught me so much about music, and I think of it as a crescendo, this mountainous rise and swell until you feel as if your heart will burst. It reminds me of the chorus in Beethoven’s Ninth. That she needed me because I had told her I was sick made the moment bittersweet, but I would take it. The hug, the holding. For the moment, she was my baby again.
    After a minute or two, she pulled away and wiped her eyes. “Damn, my nails. Figures. Nothing is going right. Shit.” She glared at me as if willing me to pick a fight over the word.
    “Do you want to talk about it?”
    “What?”
    “The cancer.”
    “No. I hate that word. I don’t want to talk about it. I want to call Justin and pretend I am an ordinary kid, not some girl whose life is like a movie of the week, you know?”
    I stood up and kissed her cheek. “I love you.”
    “Love you, too.”
    I turned and stepped over the piles of laundry on the floor, and walked out of her cluttered bedroom and down the hall into my own. I had installed a private phone line in Tara’s room six months before or I’d never be able to talk on the phone in my own house.
    I called up Michael, who had moved to the ’burbs himself two years ago, and had Noah for the night.
    “Hello?”
    “Hey Michael, how’s Noah?”
    “Sleeping. God I love them when they’re asleep. They’re a lot less work then, you know?”
    “You’re preaching to the choir, gay choirboy.”
    “You know I don’t wear anything under my choir robes, right?”
    “Yet another visual I don’t need…. So did you tell him yet?”
    “Yeah. He cried, but you know, I think he took it pretty well. He asked if Mom was going to die and all that. I told him, ‘Noah we all die someday.’”
    “You know, one of these days we’re