August of 2015
"Jake? Hi. Sorry to call you at work," she told him.
"Hold on. I can't hear you. Let me get away from the excavator. Gimme just a sec, okay?" he hollered even though she could hear him just fine.
He walked about 50 feet away from the job site then tried again.
"Leanne? You still there?"
"Yes. I'm still here," she said.
"What's going on? Is Becca okay?"
"Yes. She's fine. She's right here," he heard her say.
He could tell something was wrong by the sound of her voice, but if it wasn't their daughter, he wasn't sure how it was any of his concern. They weren't married, never had been married, and never would be. For that matter, they weren't even in love.
They'd dated briefly and as luck would have it, Jake Wheeler found out the hard way what he'd heard many times about how rare it was for a condom to break. In his case, it only happened that one time, but as he soon learned, once was more than enough.
They called things off about a week after the 'big break' happened for other, unrelated reasons, but a month later, Jake also learned his one-time girlfriend was pregnant. Having been raised to take responsibility for his actions, it never once occurred to him to do anything but step up and be a father to his yet-unknown child, and he did that from day one.
Neither he nor his ex-girlfriend, Leanne Harvey, had any interest in getting married for their baby's sake, but she knew Jake would be there for the daughter they would have some eight months later, so marriage had never even come up.
Over the following months, they got along well and while they occasionally disagreed, they never fought. After Becca was born, child support checks arrived on time the 1st of each month, and Jake willingly helped out with anything else his daughter needed.
And the truth was, he was happy to do it, because that tiny little girl had changed his world in the best possible way, and there wasn't anything he wouldn't do for her. He wasn't opposed to helping out her mother, but Leanne wasn't his responsibility, so if she was calling to ask him to...
"Jake? I...I have...I have cancer," Leanne told him without warning, causing Jake to hold the phone out and look at as though it was the source of the words he'd just heard spoken to him.
"What do you mean you have cancer?" he asked.
At the time of that phone call, Jake had been 27 years old and Leanne was just 23. Old people got cancer. So did some little kids. But not someone her age.
"It's bad, too," she told him quietly.
Jake knew she was doing her best not to cry, and suddenly he was choked up to the point where he couldn't speak.
"Jake? Are you still there?" he heard her ask.
He cleared his throat then said, "I'll be right there, okay?"
Without waiting for an answer, he hung up the phone then ran to the portable building on the job site where he knew he'd find his father, the owner of Wheeler Excavation, LLC, and told him he had an emergency.
Jake wasn't just Jeff Wheeler's son, he was the smartest, most-talented man in his employ; a man who could run any piece of equipment and perform any task from digging out a foundation to a well to anything that required moving large amounts of earth.
"Jesus! That's awful, Jake. Please let me know if I can help," his father told him as Jake flew back out the door and then to his truck.
Twenty minutes later he was at Leanne's house, and when he saw her mom's car there, he realized this was serious.
"Hey," he said to both of them as he walked in without knocking as he always did.
"Hi, Jake," Leanne's mother, Violet Harvey, said as she hugged him. "Thank you for coming home."
It wasn't his home, but he wasn't about to quibble as he looked at the mother of his child who was holding Becca in her lap.
"So...how bad is bad?" he asked, not sure what else to say, as he sat down beside her.
When Leanne's mother, one of the strongest women he'd ever met, started to cry, he knew it was really bad.
Jake Wheeler, whose given name was Jeffrey Mark Wheeler, Junior, had been a very good student in high school. He graduated with a 3.8 GPA and could have gone to nearly any college in the country. But like his father, he loved heavy equipment and had been working for his dad after school and on weekends since he turned 16. He didn't actually believe that sort of love was 'in his blood', but he knew that's the only thing he ever wanted to do.
So while he hadn't gone to college, Jake, a nickname given to him in junior high that had stuck, did a lot of reading on all kinds of topics to include science and medicine. But he'd never even heard the term 'Invasive Ductal Carcinoma' before. He had heard the term 'Metastatic Breast Cancer' and understood what metastasis meant, two terms Leanne quietly repeated to him in answer to his question.
Leanne had Stage IV metastatic, invasive ductal carcinoma that had, as the name implied, moved into the milk ducts of her left breast and further spread, or metastasized, to her lungs and then her brain.
Leanne's mother did her best to recount what the oncologist had just told them a few hours earlier after explaining why they hadn't said anything about this before.
"We...we just didn't want to worry you in case this turned out to be no big deal," her mom said. "But...but this..."
When she couldn't go on, Jake knew she wanted to say, "But this IS a big deal."
He soon learned just how big when Leanne asked him to hold their baby.
"I don't have much time left, Jake."
"How...how much time?" he asked as he took her hand.
She shook her head then said, "Six months at most and quite likely less. Regardless of how many months I have, I won't be well for some portion of it near the end."
It was beyond surreal to have gone from sitting in an excavator an hour ago prepping the ground for a house in a new development to sitting next to the woman who'd borne his child and learning there was very little chance she'd live until Christmas of that same year.
"What can I do?" Jake asked as he fought back tears.
"Take care of our baby girl," Leanne said without any hint of tearing up. "That's all I care about. And that's all that matters."
"You know I will," he told her. "But there's gotta be something I can do."
She looked right at him and said, "There really isn't anything anyone can do for me now. So I just need to know Becca will be with the one other person who loves her as much as I do."
She looked at her mother then said, "Mom? You know what I meant, right?"
"Of course, honey. And I know Jake loves my granddaughter as much as you or me, so you didn't hurt my feelings at all," her mom told her. "Jake is a fine man and a loving father."
