A New Life for Hope

It was the last day of school, and I was walking home on a very average, soaking wet grey day.
I was walking, because mum was far too sick to drive anywhere.
Besides - the old Holden that we used to have, had been sold just over a year ago to help pay for the full-time carer that mum needed.
It had been hard, so very hard, lately - but I was strong on the outside, for her sake.
When we found out about her sickness two years ago, the doctors said that she had an inoperable brain tumour, and that she wouldn’t live for more than a year.
Always a fighter, though, she had proven them wrong; but after her last scan, the doctors had told me not to expect her to live out the rest of the year – just two short months away.
I was scared; Mum’s only thirty-five.
You might, now, be wondering where my father is through all of this: well, so am I.
I’ve never met my dad; all mum would say about him - and I had to be sixteen before she’d tell me anything at all - was that it was a quick fling, and that he doesn’t matter.
Doesn’t know; doesn’t care.
I always try to think to myself; ‘That’s okay; that’s more than most kids like me know. That usually works; except when mum is having one of her bad weeks.
Then I start to think about what might happen to me once she’s gone. It’s not a happy world to think about.
That was what I was doing as I walked home: thinking about the possible future in all its glorified misery - until I turned the corner, and walked into my own street.
Then, there was only one thing that I could see.