The Real Thing by Tina Ann Forkner

Author:Tina Ann Forkner [Forkner, Tina Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, Western
ISBN: 9781943963867
Publisher: Tule Publishing
Published: 2016-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

“Young early-onset Alzheimer’s.”

“What?”

“It’s why she’d fade away sometimes, forget to change Stephen’s diaper, forget where Peyton was. She went to a doctor for help when Stevie was still a baby, and was diagnosed when she was only thirty-four. She didn’t tell me any of this, just apparently started getting everything ready, and, less than a year later, she left us while she still could.”

“But she’s way too young.” I did the math and realized she’d have only been three years older than I was right now.

“It’s not common, maybe five percent of all Alzheimer’s cases, or something like that,” he said. “Apparently, it happens. The doctor told me about rare cases like hers, where the people were in their thirties. Hell, I looked it up on the internet and only managed to find two.” He looked at me, his eyes wet. “Two cases buried in a search list of tons of articles about older people. Maybe there were more, but—” He choked up.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered, dumbfounded.

So this was what Keith had been up to all this time. Not just ranch business. I wished I’d been there with him, although something told me he’d needed to do it himself.

“Can you believe, in one of the cases I found, a man was only twenty-nine?” He shook his head in disgust. “Violet won the damned Alzheimer’s lottery.”

I choked up, too. I tried to imagine what it would have been like for Violet, a young mom, to forget to feed her baby, pick up Peyton from school, and not know what was wrong.

“I should’ve known something was off,” he said.

“You couldn’t have.” I used a dry corner of the bandanna to clean up my own face. I knew I looked hideous with my makeup smeared, but it didn’t really matter at that moment.

“So, she planned everything?”

“She made a living will while she was still in her right mind. She set things up with that lawyer to divorce me without having to see me, to make it look like she was just leaving.”

“But why? She could’ve just told you, and then you could have taken care of things. You and the kids could have visited her…and…” I thought of the sad visits to my own mother, the pain in my daddy’s face every time he looked at her.

“I wish she would have done that,” he said.

Maybe, I thought, he wouldn’t if he had seen what my dad had gone through. Violet had known what was coming. She wanted to save him, and their children, from seeing it happen. For a moment, I was struck by the deep love she must have had for him. My heart fluttered.

I didn’t let that little twinge of jealousy even make its way into the open. I didn’t know if Keith had thought of it, but we probably would never have married if Violet hadn’t done what she had. The impact of her decision on all of us was too difficult to fathom. Had Violet done the right thing? She must have seen it as an impossible situation.

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