Page 19 of Can't Get Enough

“What do you call your grandfather?” he asks with a smile of his own.

I swallow more of the cool liquid before going on. “They’re all dead, so nothing now.”

“Man, sorry to hear that.”

“They lived full lives. My mom and dad just got a little bit of a late start on the family front, so my grandparents were older.”

“You the only?”

“Yeah.” I chuckle. “My mom always said I was spoiled rotten.”

The tinkle of glass, shouts of laugher, and the faint strains of Jodeci drift from the party down to us by the water.

“I couldn’t help but overhear you singing to your mother earlier,” Maverick says, his voice carrying a mix of compassion and curiosity.

“Yeah, that hymn seems to calm her down.”

“I read that the part of the brain that stores music, prayer, poetry, and art is the last and least affected by Alzheimer’s.”

“The temporal lobe?” I ask, trying to recall the things I’ve been learning about the brain as I’ve studied the disease.

“Specifically, the temporal lobe around your right ear.” He reaches to touch behind my ear. “It holds all that stuff and can sometimes remain virtually untouched throughout the disease.”

His finger still rests behind my ear, and all my body’s sensations convene in that one spot where he’s touching me. Our eyes meet in a gaze soldered with heat and tension.

“Oh.” He drops his hand. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s fine.” I force a smile. “You were… ahem… saying about the brain?”

“Yeah.” He nods slowly, eyes not leaving mine. “Language is housed in the left temporal lobe behind your left ear. There are Alzheimer’s patients who can no longer talk because the left temporal lobe, which stores language, has been desecrated, but they can still sing entire songs with perfect pitch and perfect recall. It affects different parts of the brain at different rates.”

“That’s really fascinating.”

“There are documented cases of Parkinson’s patients whose hands stopped shaking when certain music was played,” Maverick goes on. “So the music thing makes sense with your mom. It may continue to be an effective way to soothe her when she’s agitated.”

“I love that.” The smile feels almost foreign it’s so unexpected on my face. In a moment that felt hopeless, Maverick injected hope. “I’m so glad when I find strategies or things that will help because sometimes it feels like nothing really can.”

“I think we’ve had similar experiences,” Maverick says, his voice quiet and careful as if one wrongly placed word could set off an explosion, “in that I had to watch my grandfather slip away. Like it was years, stretched out agonizingly slowly, but then my mother was ripped from us when we least expected it. I’m not sure one is better than the other. Both hurt so bad.”

“I think if I got a choice,” I say, huffing out a short breath, “I’dchoose quick. Here today. Gone tomorrow, instead of this endless half-here that my mother’s existence is becoming.”

I turn to him abruptly, shame constricting my chest.

“I don’t mean I want her gone,” I rush to say. “The exact opposite. I want all the time I can have with her. I’ll make it last as long as possible, but I don’t know thatshewould want that.”

“You don’t have to feel weird. I knew what you meant, but what makes you think she might prefer it the other way?”

“She always seems to be going back to a time when her mama was here, or my father, or just when things were happy and simple and she had a grasp on it all.”

“That’s pretty common. For them to kind of return to a time that was happy or that provided some routine, predictability.”

“She always wants to go to her shop.” I offer a sad smile. “Her old bakery. She’d go there every day if we’d let her. She wants to make the cupcakes and the free cookies she’d always have for kids who came in after school.”

He looks at me, but there’s a faraway quality to his eyes, darkened with memory and maybe a touch of sadness.

“It was the bus for Pop Pop,” he offers after a few seconds, grinning into his drink before taking a swig. “He used to drive a school bus. Every day at seven in the morning and three o’clock in the afternoon, he’d put on his coat and hat and head for the door.”

“Seriously?” Even though I know firsthand how difficult patterns like that can be, the fact that Maverick is smiling gives me permission to. “What’d you guys do?”

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