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Sadie took a breath. “I swear, Tommie, I think I saw something rise out of her like a fog. Mama kind of shuddered. And then we had a nice lunch at Catfish King. You know how she loves Catfish King. She called me Sadie Louisa. She hasn’t called me that in ages.”
    I stopped myself from saying that Sadie should be thanking a piece of fried fish for triggering Mama’s memory instead of alapsed-Catholic/psychic/yoga instructor with an occasional marijuana habit.
    Two years ago, doctors diagnosed our mother with early dementia. Eleven months ago, Daddy gave in and moved her to a nursing facility that specialized in Alzheimer’s and its many unnamed cousins.
    No cure, just drugs that could help but often didn’t. All of us took it hard, but Sadie still passionately sought the supernatural miracle that would bring Mama back to us.
    “That’s great,” I said carefully.
    “Really?”
    “Really. Good job.” I wasn’t lying. It probably did Mama a world of good to get out of that place for a while. And who was I, the runaway, to criticize how Sadie took care of Mama when I was usually hundreds of miles north?
    We hung up, agreeing that I’d be at the ranch by mid-afternoon, with CFS in hand as a peace offering. That would be text-speak for Chicken Fried Steak.
    I spent twenty glorious minutes with my back to the shower’s luxury hot water massager, the equivalent of a generous man giving me a back rub without expecting anything in return.
    While I toweled off, my brain, still relentlessly processing, conjured up another picture. Mama pulling weeds in the garden, singing to herself, a mournful, bluesy song at odds with a bright day, knee deep in cilantro and lemon mint, the most cheerful of herbs. Still, it was a beautiful sound. Haunting. I was about thirteen, several yards away, cutting lilac for the sachets Granny liked in her underwear drawer.
    When I asked, Mama told me the song was an Ethel Waters classic from the twenties. She said her mother used to sing it to her when she was a little girl. She seldom mentioned her mother, so those few words, that tiny glimpse, were a rare gift.
    An odd lullaby, I thought. More of a lament.
    Ain’t these tears in these eyes tellin’ you
.
    Right after Mama was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, I became obsessed with listening to every version of “Am I Blue” in digital existence. Ella Fitzgerald, Linda Ronstadt, Ray Charles, Bette Midler, Willie Nelson. At the time I just thought I was missing the Mama who used to know the words, hoping to trap her inside a little machine and plug her voice back into my head.
    Now I wondered if my subconscious had been bubbling up, telling me that even at thirteen, I already knew something was not quite right. That the song was a clue.
    A finger of dread found its way under the thick cotton of the complimentary hotel robe. I shivered. I stared in the mirror and told myself to buck up, raking my fingers through wet, stringy hair that reached halfway down my back.
    I’d never believed in layers or bangs or Chi irons. I washed my hair. I combed my hair. I let the air dry it.
    I’d only seriously chopped it off once, three years ago, donating it to a little girl named Darcy. In her case,
A
was for alopecia. She’d arrived at the ranch with a bad synthetic wig and the kind of emotional scars that only other little twelve-year-old boys and girls can scratch out on your heart. Darcy loved the horses first and my hair second. When she left, a hairdresser in town cut off fifteen inches. I put it in a plastic bag as a goodbye present, which sounds creepy but wasn’t in the least.
    Myra, a good friend and the psychologist who ran the therapy side of the ranch, pulled me in afterward.
    “That wasn’t exactly protocol,” she said.
    “Do you think it was the wrong thing to do?”
    “I don’t know. It’s not Darcy I’m worried about, Tommie. Or any of the other kids. You have the highest degree of success of anybody here. I give you the most