They spent the next half hour cleaning and bedding one of the unused stalls for him and letting him meet June, Biscuit, and Loretta over their stall doors.
“Weird horse, huh Murph?” Dillon murmured as they moved on from the donkey.
“Wait till he gets a load of Dolly,” Tessa replied. “She’ll be the weirdest looking cow he’s ever seen.”
Dillon grinned and nodded.
Murphy did prick his ears and take a hard look at the llama, but after one skeptical blow through his nose, he seemed to accept the strange creature and relaxed. Dillon unloaded a bag of Murphy’s current grain and told Tessa how to transition him over to her horse feed, which was thankfully similar to the stuff he was already on. When he was settled in his stall placidly munching on some hay, they left him alone to settle in.
Dillon volunteered to pick Makayla up from school, and Tessa agreed to close the store early and be home when they arrived so she could see Makayla’s reaction to her new horse.
Dillon left, grinning like he’d just won the lottery, and she spent the next hour photographing a gown in Mick’s woodshop. The bias-cut silk moved in the golden light like water, the train sweeping across the planked floor elegantly.
When she reviewed the shots on her laptop back in the kitchen, she sat very still for a moment. These were the best photographs she’d ever taken. Quiet satisfaction flowed through her. She’d just finished labeling and saving the best images when her phone lit up on the table.
Mother.
Every muscle in Tessa’s body tensed. She was sorely tempted to ignore it. But the one thing worse than a call from Judith was not knowing what her mother had to say.
“Hello, Mother.”
“Tessa.” Judith’s voice was devoid of warmth, as always. “I’m calling to update you on your grandfather.”
Tessa went outside and sat in the wicker chair because, if the news was bad, she wanted to be able to see the mountains while she heard it.
“How is he?”
“He’s settled in the memory unit, and they’ve put him on a new medication that seems to have stopped his agitation.” A beat. “He’s stopped asking for Tassie.”
Tessa closed her eyes as Judith’s dagger found its target and slipped between her ribs.
Her mother twisted the knife, saying, “He’s asking for his mother now. Alzheimer’s patients often fixate on people associated with various times in their past as they regress.”
Regress. Judith had a gift for selecting the single word that would do the most damage, as if she had a thesaurus in her mind organized from gentle to fatal and always reached for the lethal end of the shelf.
“The staff says he’s content. Harmless. Yesterday he told a nurse his mother would be by to pick him up from school soon.”
Across the lake, the mountainsides were turning shades of light, fresh green. Tessa watched it without really seeing it. Her Gramps wasn’t asking for her anymore. He wasn’t asking for his wife. He wasn’t asking for anyone he’d known for the past sixty years. He was a small boy waiting for his mother.
She understood, with a clarity that struck her all at once, that the last bridge between herself and her grandfather had quietly fallen in on itself while she wasn’t looking. And her mother wanted her to know it. Be hurt by it.
“Thank you, Mother,” she said, proud of how level she kept her voice. “Is there anything else?”
“The Whitmore Academy has extended the audition window for Makayla by two weeks as a courtesy. I told them you’d be in touch in the next few days.”
A beat.
“Goodbye, Mother.”
“Tessa—”
She hung up.
She set the phone face-down on the arm of the wicker chair and laced her fingers together formally in her lap. And then she dropped her forehead onto her hands and stopped pretending.
The grief that rose in her was not the sudden wound and sharp agony of losing Mick. This grief was a cut that bled slowly, drop by painful drop, as someone she loved vanished one memory at a time. He’d forgotten her name. And now he had forgotten he was ever old enough to have a granddaughter at all.
Her throat hurt. Her chest hurt. Her hands gripped each other hard enough to leave marks. She was, she registered distantly, not going to be able to put this pain back in its box. But she refused to cry.