Prologue—Blair
“I have lost myself, so to say.”
—Auguste Deter (first person to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease)
At 5:48 p.m. on Christmas Day, my life fell apart.
Rapidly blinking to clear the hazy film blurring the elaborate turkey dinner in front of me, I look toward the living room to avoid my mother’s gaze. Not twenty minutes ago, I was curled up on the couch with my sister in our matching pajamas, teasing Mom for turning on the fireplace television channel. Now the loudly crackling faux-fire and accompanying sleighbell-filled music adds levity I don’t appreciate.
Backdropped by the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree, my dad sits with a pained smile. “Sorry we didn’t tell you sooner.”
Alzheimer’s disease: a neurodegenerative disease that causes memory and thinking ability to decline. The most common form of dementia; it is irreversible.
Outside the snow is falling in a swirling fury—the perfect representation of what’s happening in my chest while I stare past my dad, cracking my knuckles to keep thoughts of hitting him at bay. Punching my loving father in the face won’t solve anything. It won’t change my mom’s diagnosis, or the fact that they’ve kept it hidden from me for months. But itwillupset my parents, my sister, and my ten-year-old nephew.
The muscles around my chest constrict my lungs, and I struggle to take a full inhale as panicked thoughts overwhelmmy brain. Letting out a shaky breath, I do what I always do: smile.
“Okay, we’ll handle it.” I clasp my hands in my lap to keep them from trembling wildly. “People are living so much longer with the disease now. There are tons of treatment options. We can set up some safety equipment—locks, alarms, notes—and it’ll be fine.”
It’ll be fine.
“It’ll be fine,” I repeat while fighting the waver in my smile. I give my younger sister a nod of encouragement, blinking back tears when I see marked fear in her eyes.
Of course, it won’t be fine. Our mom is younger than the typical age for Alzheimer’s. And while neuroscience wasn’t something I focused a lot on during my six years of nursing and graduate school, I know early-onset Alzheimer’s often progresses faster. Mom will forget everything she knows, piece by piece. Until her brain loses the ability to keep her body functioning. And nobody in this family will ever truly be fine again.
But for now—for the sake of protecting them—I’ll say it’s fine.
Fifteen minutes later, I excuse myself from Christmas dinner and pull out my laptop to spend the rest of the night in a deep dive on Alzheimer’s disease. Except a distracting orange sticky note on top reminds me of a call I was supposed to have with the local doctor, Dr. Brickham, earlier in the week about a job. My dad set it up, suggesting I take the job because of how desperate Wells Canyon is for decent medical care. But from what I can tell, every conversation I’ve had with my parents over the past six months was a long string of lies. Now I realize this was his subtle way of getting me to move back home.
“Fuck,” I mutter to myself, crumpling the paper and chucking it in the direction of the wastebasket.
Of course I forgot.My brain is essentially 2,875 sticky notesin a messy pile, so it comes as no surprise that adding one more to the chaos didn’t make the information stick. Now Mom’s diagnosis means I get to add a new batch of unhelpful notes to my muddled mind.
I flop back on the bed of my childhood room with a defeated exhale, staring at the spackled ceiling through tear-stained vision. I simply cannot be a thirty-one-year-old living in a room with fucking glow-in-the-dark stars across my ceiling. Sobbing, I stand on my bed and stretch until my ribs burn and I can barely lift my arms, peeling off every damn plastic star.
Like it or not, I’m moving back to Wells Canyon.
Denver
It’s not that I’m trying to die—it’s that I don’t particularly care if I do. Not if I go out on the back of a horse, with the sun on my back and a smile on my face. Few people understand that, but my mom always did, which is why she’s the only person I want to talk to in the moments leading up to every ride.
There’s nothing but the gentle sound of stretching denim and leather when I squat down in the alley. A fiery course of electricity radiates up my thighs to crackle in my spine, and I take my time straightening back up. After a few slow neck rolls, I’m primed and ready to jump on the back of a bucking horse.
My hands skate up my worn chaps on their way to my mouth, and I press the pads of the index and middle fingers to my lips, then tap them gently against my mother’s memorial plaque on the barn wall.
“Give ’em hell,” I whisper on my way out the door. It’s become somewhat of an incantation in the years since I last heard her say it. A message to wherever her spirit might be; a reminder that I’m nottryingto die, if she wouldn’t mind looking out for me.
After a long, harsh winter, the first rodeo of the spring is a sold-out show. The stands are packed, with spectators shoulder-to-shoulder along every square inch of fence raillining the arena. But I’m not nervous about having a few hundred sets of eyes on me. It only ups the ante because, even if I don’t win, I always come to impress. After all, putting on a show for the crowd is almost as important as winning—especially at these small-town rodeos with relatively lean payouts.
Swinging wide arm circles to warm up my shoulders, I track down Colt—one of the ranch hands at my family’s 20,000-head cattle operation. Besides the local buckle bunnies, he might be my biggest fan around here. And since my best friend decided to start ditching me for dad duties, Colt’s the only guy I can count on to rodeo with me.
Turning the corner, I spot him leaning against the rails of a bucking chute, talking to Peyton. Normally, Peyton would be a sight for sore eyes, with blond hair, blue eyes, great tits, and a penchant for cowboys. Plus, she’s fun enough to hang out with short term, which is the most I can offer any of the women around here.
What more could I ask for?
A flash of brown hair in the background pulls my attention away. I’m shit at gambling, but I’d bet at least fifty percent of the women here have brown hair. There have to be a hundred brunettes in this place, so it couldn’t be. Wouldn’t be.
Right when I’m reminding myself that she wouldn’t be caught dead at a rodeo in Wells Canyon, the sight of her profile as she dips into the crowd of barrel racers plucks at a too-tight guitar string in my chest.
