My phone beeped in the kitchen where Ben had plugged it in. I laid Mama’s hand back on the quilt and retrieved my phone from the desk. Sumner.
Just wanted to make sure you got home okay. Thanks for coming tonight. You are magical.
I leaned against the back of the chair and exhaled as a wave of clashing emotions coursed through my mind. The first part of the evening had been perfect—sunshine, water, Sumner, and his laughter and optimism. Then the shock of finding my driveway full of cars, Mama on the couch, Ben standing like a sentry in my kitchen.
I thought back to that moment in Twig when I considered telling Sumner about Mama and the mystery of what was happening in her mind. I hadn’t wanted to make it real by speaking it out loud, but after tonight, there was no denying that something was happening. Something big and baffling and scary. Opening up to him now would make sense. After all, he’d been honest with me about his wife’s death and how hard that had been on him.
But something was keeping me from going there with him—from trusting him with my full, honest self. What was it?
As I tried to think of how to respond, a second text came through. This time it was Ben.
You okay?
Just the sight of his name on the screen settled something in me. He’d taken care of everything tonight, and probably without asking a single question. A simple “thank you”—for coming to Evan’s rescue, for finding Mama, for handling it all when I wasn’t around to do it myself—felt empty in comparison.
From the very beginning Ben had been steadfast and unwavering in his friendship and devotion. Anytime something bad happened—if I made a bad grade, had an argument with a friend, or got in trouble for breaking curfew—he was there with the listening ear, the sympathetic words, the well-timed humor.
Maybe that was part of the reason I kept him—and his heart—at arm’s length. What teenager actually valued such a strong, steady presence? I’d been waiting for a spark, for excitement, for that delicious, twitchy feeling in my stomach, all the butterfly wings flapping in tandem. As an adult, I knew those things amounted to nothing more than a flimsy wish, but as a young woman, I thought that was love. I didn’t know finding a good man meant looking past the sparks and butterflies.
Ben was that good man. He’d been one then and he was still one now. Marissa was a lucky woman. I’d been lucky once too. I just didn’t know it.
CHAPTER 27
Chamomile is often thought to symbolize relaxation and peace, but a less common meaning of this delicate white and yellow flower is “energy in adversity.”
—LUCY LANGWORTHY, GUIDE TO FRAGRANT FLOWERS, 1945
GUS
Despite Harvis’s insistence that I tell Jessie what was going on in my squirrely head, I was dead set on not telling her. At least not until I figured it out on my own. How I was going to figure it out on my own, I hadn’t the foggiest, but darn it if I wasn’t going to try. And darn it if Harvis didn’t spill the beans to her the night I got lost.
I still wasn’t sure what exactly had happened. I’d been flipping through a back issue of Better Homes & Gardens, looking for a specific recipe for okra succotash, when the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. At first I thought I’d heard someone at the door, but no knock came, no scuffling like someone was on the front porch. But the worried, panicked feeling didn’t go away. Then it got worse, and I remembered my legs feeling antsy, like I needed to get up and move around.
Next thing I knew, Ben Bradley’s hand was on my shoulder, his calm voice telling me it was time to come on home. I hadn’t realized I wasn’t home until that moment. Everything before and after that was a blur. I woke up the next day with an urge to make oatmeal cookies, but Jessie’s and Evan’s hushed voices and worried eyes told me I’d lost another part of myself. It was becoming a regular occurrence, and I wasn’t ashamed to say I hated it.
Jessie had already made me an appointment with some fancy doctor, but she called and demanded they let us come in that afternoon. I tried to tell her it was unnecessary, but she waved me off. Finally she said, “Thank you,” and hung up with a satisfied smile. The crease between her eyebrows deepened again the moment she turned to me. “They’ll see us at ten o’clock.”
“Jessie, this doctor is all the way in Mobile and it’s prime shopping time. Is it really that responsible to close Twig? What if someone needs to buy something?”
“Responsible?” Her face was pink. I’d struck a nerve. “Last night Ben found you walking up the road with no shoes on, tears running down your face, unsure of how you got there or where you were going. Weeks ago, Harvis found you huddled on your couch thinking water was flooding your house. You know what’s going on, he knows, but I know nothing.” She held up a hand when I tried to speak. “I don’t want to hear it, Mama. I want to hear it straight from the doctor.”
The worst part was, I couldn’t defend myself. She was right—I knew exactly what was happening. When my mother had died from complications from Alzheimer’s and my father told me her mother, my grandmother, had died the same way, my reality settled deep in my bones: that’s how I’d go too. I just assumed it would happen when I was old. Sixty-nine was not old, thank you very much. Yes, my mother and grandmother had died in their seventies, but I figured I had enough vinegar in my bones to hold it off an extra decade or two. I guess I was wrong.
The two of us arrived at the doctor’s office fifteen minutes before my appointment. Evan had stayed behind to man the shop. While Jessie filled out paperwork and nervously bounced her leg up and down, I checked out the waiting room. Waiting rooms were notorious for having free stuff—or coupons for free stuff—and I didn’t want to pass any of it up. Before my name was called, I managed to pocket four coupons for Bengay and a sample-size bottle of Gold Bond hand lotion.
The nurse who called us led me to an exam room and quickly took the necessary stats—height, weight, blood pressure, pulse. She held up a thermometer and I dutifully opened my mouth. She held out her hand and I held out my wrist. With two fingers on my artery, she closed her eyes and counted. Satisfied, she tapped her fingers on the iPad on her lap. “Healthy as a horse,” she said. I turned to Jessie and smiled. She pretended not to see it.
We waited an interminable thirty minutes with nothing but a Popular Mechanics from 2015 before the doctor finally came in. Jessie greeted him warmly, but I rolled my eyes. The kid looked barely older than Evan.
“How old are you?” I asked him.
He smiled. “I’m thirty-three, Mrs. McBride. How old are you?”
I raised my eyebrows. “Did your mother not teach you any manners?”
Jessie cleared her throat. “She’ll be seventy in November.”
“I’m sixty-nine, thank you.”
He laughed. “I like you already.”
“Humph.” I didn’t give him the satisfaction of a smile.
After a few swipes on the iPad the nurse had left on the desk, he crossed his arms and stretched his legs out in front of him. “Let’s chat, why don’t we?” He then proceeded through a whole rigmarole of questions, asking me everything from what I had for dinner when I was four years old to what colors I saw when I closed my eyes to what items I’d put on a grocery list for a holiday meal.
“Why in the world do you want to know that? We’re months away from the holidays.”
He smiled again. He was the smilingest doctor I’d ever known. Probably due to his young age. “It’s called mental cognitive status. I’m asking you questions to test yours.”
“And to test it you need to know my holiday recipe list? That’s personal, if you must know.”
“Mother, please.” Jessie only called me Mother when she was almost to her breaking point. I straightened up and ran through my ingredient list for cornbread dressing, and for good measure, my recipe for pecan spoonbread too.
He kept asking me questions. About my recent “episodes”—when I couldn’t remember details, Jessie filled them in, something I both appreciated and resented. About my
medications, vitamins, diet. About my use of alcohol. “None, thank you,” I replied. “Although this line of questioning is making me seriously rethink that.”
He chuckled and continued. Past injuries, surgeries, complications. Medical conditions of my family members, living and deceased. I shifted on the paper-covered bed. I knew that was the question that would get me into trouble.
“My grandmother had . . .” I swallowed. “Well, she had trouble in her mind.”
“Oh?” His eyebrows rose a notch.
“Everyone called it Old Timer’s disease. Some people said she was senile.”
The doctor laced his fingers together. “Back then, not everyone knew the term Alzheimer’s. And the disease is 70 percent genetic.”
I fluttered my eyes closed a moment, then opened them. Jessie was staring at me hard, but I kept my focus on the doctor. “By the time my mother developed it, we knew more about it. They at least used the right term for it.”
“Alzheimer’s?” Jessie asked. “Mama?”
I finally looked at her. Her eyes were rimmed with tears. “Oh, baby. You had to know.”
She covered her face with her hands and leaned forward.
“I wondered,” she said through her hands. Then she sniffed and sat up. Her cheeks were wet and splotchy. “I knew Minnie forgot things a lot.” I loved hearing her use her childhood name for my mother, who had died when Jessie was only seventeen. “I didn’t know about her mom though. Your grandmother. I guess I never asked for details.”
“And they weren’t details I was itching to give you. Who wants to tell her daughter there’s a line of Alzheimer’s running straight as a ruler right through the women in her family? I wanted to protect you as long as I could.”
She exhaled, blowing her bangs up off her forehead.
The doctor stood and opened the door, motioning to the nurse outside. “I’m going to have Helen take you down for a CT scan. It’ll show us the structure of the brain and any shrinkage. It’ll also rule out conditions that cause similar symptoms.”
“What would those be?” Jessie asked. I knew what she was thinking—maybe there was something else that could be causing all this mess. Something other than the Big Thing.
“It could be any number of things. Brain tumor, aneurysm, bleeding in the brain . . .”
Jessie sat ramrod straight in her seat. I cleared my throat and tried to catch the doctor’s eye.
“Given your symptoms and your family’s medical history, I don’t think you need to worry about those.”
The nurse came in and whisked me down the hall to another room. Through a glass door stood a contraption lined with blinking lights, shiny silver, and a round contraption as big as Marilyn Rickers’s Smart car.
A minute later, I was lying down on the conveyor belt with the instruction not to move a muscle. An IV in my arm shot cold liquid through my veins, and I breathed as shallow as I could while the machine clicked and spun to life. She said it would somehow take pictures of thin slices of my brain. I was just glad I couldn’t feel it.
An hour later, I was in the doctor’s personal office in a chair next to Jessie. All around us sat framed photos of the doctor’s young and beautiful family. Blonde wife, two cherubic babies. Twins, from the looks of them. It was a wonder that this man who worked with patients with a smorgasbord of elderly brain problems went home to this family every night. Alzheimer’s to baby bottles. The speed of life could still sometimes take me by surprise.
He folded his hands and gave the news I knew we’d hear. Without an MRI it was just a preliminary diagnosis, but he felt fairly confident it was Alzheimer’s. Beginning stages. Impossible to estimate the progression. Could be years of casual lapses, like lately, or my brain function could deteriorate rapidly. Then he had the gall to suggest I needed supervision, as if I were a child.
“I’ve been on my own for quite a long time now. I think I’m just fine.”
“You’re not on your own. You have us.” Jessie turned to the doctor. “She lives next door to me . . . well, through some trees, but still, she’s the next house. She’s at my house almost all day though.”
“That’s good. But what about nighttime? At some point, she—” I cleared my throat and he turned to me and smiled. “You will likely experience what we call Sundowning, or late-day confusion. Later stages of Alzheimer’s cause patients to experience heightened confusion and disorientation as the sun goes down.”
Jessie looked at me, likely thinking of the night before, but another shot of memory raced through me. My own mother used to pace at night. Nothing seemed able to calm her down. Not until she finally fell into a fitful sleep. Was that my future? “I can handle nighttime just fine,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “That’s when my shows come on.”
“Mrs. McBride. This is real, I’m sorry to tell you. It’s not going away. You’ll need to treat it seriously.”
“I’m taking it seriously, young man. I’ve known about this a lot longer than you have. I just don’t want you to go deciding things for me. I may not have a white coat with my name in curly script on the front, but I’m well aware of how this thing works.”
“Is there any medicine, or do we just . . . ?” Jessie was gripping one hand in the other, squeezing her fingers together as if they were one of those heart-shaped stress balls they gave out in the cath lab.
He sat forward in his chair, as if this was the part he enjoyed. “Unfortunately, there’s no medicine to slow the progression, but there are drugs that may help lessen the symptoms. There are also clinical trials . . .”
They spent the next ten minutes discussing my medical care—drug possibilities, side effects, trials, and outcomes—as if I weren’t even there. And I let them. Talking about it was exhausting.
When we finally left, the bright sunshine outside was a shock. I covered my eyes with my hand and inhaled the air that thankfully didn’t smell like disinfectant and sweet air freshener. My stomach rumbled. “What do you think about Jack & Mack’s on the way home? I could go for an onion burger.”
Jessie shook her head and sighed. “Lord, Mama, you’re acting like you just picked up a cold or a stomach bug.”
“What do you want me to say?” She yanked open her car door and I did the same. “That I’m scared? That I want to scream and pound the walls with my fists? That it makes me feel weak and small and helpless?”
Jessie turned to me with wide eyes, wet around the edges. I shook my head. No, ma’am. We were not going to share a good cry right there in the parking lot. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not saying any of that. And truthfully, I’d rather you not cry for me either. It’s not like I’m dying tomorrow.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw two nurses leave out of a side door of the office. One of them was mine. Where she’d been all business in the office—no chitchat, no extra words—now she was smiling, laughing. I crossed my arms and felt like something important had just been taken from me.
Jessie jerked the car into Drive and took us home. We were silent the entire way.
CHAPTER 28
Often used in weddings, the lily of the valley symbolizes sweetness and purity, but it can also denote reconciliation or the return of happiness.
—DR. JULIUS GRISSOM, THE GRISSOM GUIDE
JESSIE
I’d always been good at holding back my tears, and that day was no different. After the appointment that morning, Mama whisked herself into the house and I barged into Twig, pushing the front door open so hard a display of painted wooden signs clattered to the floor. If I hadn’t been so angry—at her, at the doctor, at everything—I would have found it funny, both of us mad as wet cats and fleeing into our separate corners to lick our fur and calm down.
Except that I didn’t calm down. All day I rang up customers—thankfully no longer by hand—hauled pots and plastic crates to cars, and spread dirt and fertilizer, but my mind stayed as frantic as it had felt when I was sitting in the doctor’s hard chair, my stomach twisted into a knot
of nerves. Anytime I thought about the future and its unknowable years, Mama and her “It’s no big deal” attitude, and the fact that I’d have to tell Evan about the diagnosis, grief banged loudly on some internal door. But I refused to open it up.
It wasn’t until the last customer drove away that I cracked that door open and let the tears come. It was the sight of Mama that did it. From the back room of Twig, as I washed my hands in the big sink, I could see her in the kitchen window of my house. She walked back and forth between the counter and the sink, likely working out her own frustrations with flour, butter, and sugar.
Then Evan walked into the kitchen. Mama rubbed her back and held a spoon out to her mouth to taste whatever concoction she’d been working on. It was a regular occurrence, nothing special about it, but in light of our new hard reality, it felt too tender for my heart to take.
I hadn’t noticed anyone drive up, so when a car door slammed, I flew to the front counter where Mama kept a box of tissues stashed somewhere. I fumbled around a moment looking for something, even a napkin or spare T-shirt, to wipe my face before greeting the last-minute customer.
Before I turned around though, he spoke. “I brought you a cucumber,” Ben said. “It’s not much, but it’s sort of a thank-you gift.”
My stomach plummeted and I gave up trying to find a tissue. I used the back of my hand instead. “You don’t need to do that.” I didn’t turn around.
“I know, but if it weren’t for you, we wouldn’t have cucumbers and tomatoes for our salad. And tonight we will.”
I sniffed quietly, but he heard it.
“Hey, hey.” He appeared at my side and turned me to face him. I knew my face was a wreck, but I couldn’t do anything about it.
A car drove up outside and voices filled the air. Ben walked to the door and flipped the sign around in the window. “Sorry,” he called through the window. “She’s closed.”
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