I fucking hate Alzheimer’s disease.

Beau

A wayward moth flutters against the ceiling as I lay in bed staring up in the dimly lit bedroom. It’s early to be in bed, only eight o’clock, but I’m more tired than usual tonight and I have a lot on my mind.

I still can’t believe she agreed to live here. I mean not here in the main house but on my land, within my reach, on my payroll and within eyesight twenty-four hours a day seven days a week.

That’s probably exaggerating a bit. It’s not like I’ll be watching her sleep in my king sized four-poster bed, between the fifteen hundred thread count Egyptian cotton sheets. Or padding around on the hard wood, in just a t-shirt and fuzzy socks, holding her first cup of coffee of the day under her nose inhaling deeply with her eyes closed.

Damn this woman has gotten under my skin and made me uncomfortable. I literally cannot stop thinking about her for five minutes. And ninety percent of those thoughts include her being in varying degrees of undress in my house, bent over the kitchen counter or the couch or any surface that is waist high. Sometimes I have her pinned up against the pillar just inside the front door or tangled in my arms in my oversized sinker tub, but she’s always ready and willing to let me do whatever I please.

That forbidden woman is going to be mine, one way or another. I may have to battle my father in a messy war, but I’m up for the fight. I have never had feelings for a woman before. All of this is foreign to me. The overwhelming compulsion to possess her and keep her safe, the urge to press my mouth on hers every time she’s within reach, is with me constantly. The way she has moved into my mind and made herself right at home in my thoughts.

Dealing with mom won’t be easy either. She hates the Deardon’s as much as dad, but she loses more of her memory every day. If something doesn’t change soon she won’t know a Deardon from a Hill and that’s the only good thing that could come from this horrible disease.

The shuffling sound of mom’s slippers against the wood floors in the kitchen down the hall keeps my senses on high alert. I can tell where she is in the room when she moves between the rugs and the wood. Each rug has a different pile therefore sounding unique and the floors telltale creaks make it easy to pinpoint her location.

Right now she’s making tea on the stove. At night she becomes more disoriented so I listen carefully to be sure she takes the proper steps, filling the tea kettle, turning on the stove, waiting for it whistle and most importantly turning off the stove.

I don’t know where dad is, he should be out there making sure she doesn’t burn herself or leave the stove on. He knows I’m here though and he takes advantage of it at times, going out to play cards with his friends or working late calving the cows. He just won’t admit she’s getting worse and he doesn’t have to when he knows I’m here for her.

The main house is large, but when I moved back in I chose the guest room over my old bedroom that I had as a child. The guest bedroom is purposely separated from the other bedrooms to provide privacy, albeit not enough.

I moved out of this house when I was nineteen years old after I built my own home on our land. That was one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done, and it took every spare minute of my time during high school to do it.

It was a simple open concept 3500 square foot ranch home with one piece of furniture back then, my bed. After five years of updating you could call it a luxury ranch and sell it for over a half a million easy. It has amazing views from every window and every modern accessory known to man. I miss my damn house.

I enjoyed living alone. I liked the quiet and knowing that something would be exactly where I put it until I came back for it again. I liked having the freedom to bring women home and fuck them until they screamed so loud the cows moved to the far end of the field to get away from the noise. I liked cooking for one and cleaning for one and having an entire house instead of a measly man cave.

Now I spend my evenings listening for my mother to go to bed so I can close my eyes and stop worrying about her wandering outside or setting the place on fire. We need help. She can’t be left alone anymore and I don’t want to wait for a catastrophe to happen before we hire someone to sit with her. Tomorrow I’m going to call a health care service and get the ball rolling, with or without dad’s permission.

Then I’ll head to my lawyer’s office in Redwater and have him draw up papers giving the Deardon’s ownership of the land our families have been fighting over for all these years. I’ll have him doctor them up to seem like the land was theirs all along. I don’t want Charlotte’s parents to think it’s a hand out, even though it is.

That land is ours, I’ve taken care of it, built a small house on it and the fact that I can give it away is proof that it’s legally Hill land. I’ve known this for four years when I hired someone to dig deep and get to the bottom of the story. I wanted to build there but not until I knew for sure it was our land. It took almost a year but the investigator uncovered the truth.

I never told my dad or the Deardon’s. There was no reason to stir up the past and no one was actively fighting over it. I don’t think anyone even knows I built the tiny two-bedroom house there, which is ironic since that piece of land is one of the key aspects of the Hill/Deardon family feud.

The sound of ceramic shattering into a million pieces yanks me from bed. Barefoot I halt at the end of the hall when I see my mom standing by the kitchen table surrounded by broken glass.

“Don’t move, Mom. I’ll get a broom.” I take a detour through the living room to the other side of the kitchen, where we keep a broom and dustpan in a closet. I slip my feet into a pair of work boots by the front door and make my way back to my mom.

I keep an eye on her making sure she doesn’t step into the glass but it doesn’t seem necessary. She’s frozen in place staring at me like I’m a stranger.

I sweep around her feet first and help her to the couch. When she sits she looks up with her big green eyes. “Mack, will you get me some tea?” Her voice is weak and small unlike my mother’s strong authoritative tone. She thinks I’m my father. This isn’t the first time she has mistaken me for him. It’s easy to see why when you look at photographs of my father when he was younger.

We look like brothers, same tall stature, same blonde hair and navy blue eyes, same sharp jawline. I definitely got his looks but mom always said I have her expressions.

“Mom, I’m Beau, your son. Mack will be home soon, he’s still out in the pastures.”

The corners of her eyes crinkle and she reaches up to place her hand on my cheek.

“Beau?” She shakes her head and narrows her eyes as if she is trying to understand what I’m telling her. It’s a strange kind of pain I feel when my own mother doesn’t recognize me, her only son. I thought it would lesson over time but it only seems to hurt more every time it happens.

“Yes, Mama, Beauregard Samuel Hill, remember? You named me after your grandpa.” Sometimes talking about grandpa helps to snap her back to the here and now but not always. She always remembers her father. It’s the past thirty years, the only years I know, that elude her.

“Mack it’s not nice to play games. Will you get me some tea?” Her hand falls away and so do her eyes.

“Sure, let me finish cleaning up this glass first.”

“Glass? Did someone break something? I hope it wasn’t one of my antique milk glass vases, those were so expensive and I just got them.”

She’s had those vases for as long as I can remember. I wonder what year she would say it is if I asked.

“No, it was just a coffee mug from the dollar store, nothing valuable.”

“The dollar store?”

“Yeah, it’s a place where… never mind, Mama. I’ll get your tea.” I have to catch myself when I start trying to explain the twentieth century to her when she gets like this.

I sweep up the mess and kick off the boots that are making my bare feet sweat when I’m done. Moving around the kitchen making her tea I keep one eye on her at all times even though she isn’t doing anything, just staring. Fucking Alzheimer’s disease either turns her into a zombie or us into strangers. They say it’s harder on the families of people with the disease but I can’t imagine how frightening it must be to have chunks of time disappear, chunks that get bigger and bigger as time goes on.

Once she lost an entire day, it was Friday and she insisted it was Wednesday. She’d spent the entire day before dazed and confused and it scared the hell out of me.

With warm tea in her stomach I tucked her into bed while she chatted on and on about her childhood. I can’t leave her alone like this. I pull a chair up next to her bed and wait for my father to come home from wherever the hell he is.

Struggling to keep my eyes open I vow that she will never be left alone again, ever.

Tomorrow we hire a nurse.

Tomorrow our families bury the hatchet.

Tomorrow I kiss Charlotte Deardon.