The Deep Read Online Free Page A

doing girly things. Mona had a slingshot; we’d peg cans down at the town dump. One time I suggested pegging one of the dump critters—the big rats, maybe a raven—and she slugged me so hard that my shoulder was purple the next day. God, she was so mad . She said that ugly creatures got a right to exist same as you or me.”
    Leo chuckled, the skin at the edges of his eyes crinkling. He gave Luke a knowing shrug that said: You’ve heard this story before, haven’t you ?
    Luke had. Just about everyone left had heard it, or lived it, or both.
    “I proposed to her on her nineteenth birthday. Down on one knee in Doyer’s Burger Barn, of all places. When she said yes, my heart just about floated out of my chest and bobbed in the rafters like a balloon on a string. I took over my father’s business. Mona taught at the local elementary school. We had great years together, twenty-one of them in a row. The last two were harder, sure . . . but hell. That’s life, right?”
    Leo refilled his glass and drained half at a go, his Adam’s apple jogging.
    “Happened first was, Mona forgot our anniversary. It wasn’t such a big deal, except she had a mind for dates. But what the heck, Mona forgets our anniversary. No big deal.”
    He finished his drink and poured another belt. He didn’t drink it; he just cupped the glass in his hands as if to draw warmth from it.
    “It happened so gradually you could half convince yourself it wasn’t anything to worry about. You could say: Well, hell, Mona is past fifty; a little memory loss is par for the course. But it got worse. She forgot to flick the turn signal when she was driving. No big whoop—our town was small, traffic’s light. But then she forgot that a red light means ‘stop’ and blew right through an intersection; our Toyota got T-boned by a Lincoln. She was okay, thank God, but after that we decided it was best that I hold on to the car keys.”
    Leo beheld Luke miserably over the rim of the glass.
    “Mona brought it up after the accident—was it Alzheimer’s ? Early onset? That made the most sense. Heck, at first that’s what all the wonks thought it was, too—a hyper-aggressive strain of Alzheimer’s. But as we figured out, the ’Gets is something else entirely. She started writing notes to herself. When it was getting bad, I mean, when she was breaking out in those god-awful scabs. She’d fill notebooks with dates and times and little fragments of info. She had a stack of them, all filled with her neat schoolteacher’s handwriting.”
    Luke set a hand on his shoulder. “Listen, you don’t have to—”
    Leo waved Luke’s suggestion off with impatience. “What, am I dropping your mood, Doc?”
    Luke thought: The story I could tell you, my friend, would sour your mood far worse. So don’t you worry about it one bit.
    “Go on, Leo.”
    “I watched it,” Leo continued. “God. I watched her forget. Then one day, she’s staring at me across the kitchen table. And her mouth falls open and out comes a half-chewed dinner roll. She hadn’t spoken for days at that point. I don’t even know how much of her was left anymore. We sat that way for a few hours. Mona slumped there, mouth open. I tried to close it for her, but it’d just fall right open again.
    “That night, I carried her upstairs and undressed her. I took off her . . . Doc, she was wearing diapers. Those were hard to lay your hands on by then. Pharmacies all sold out. It busted me up to pull those god-awful things on and off my wife—but if you love someone, you love them in all their states, don’t you? Sickness and health.
    “I put her nightgown on and put her in bed and lay down beside her. I was crying, yeah, but I tried to be real soft about it. I don’t imagine it troubled her. Sometime that night, she . . . stopped , I guess? It happened quickly, which was a relief. She forgot how to live, or . . . damn it all, I don’t know how this disease finishes us. It didn’t seem