Free Shawn's Law by Renae Kaye Page A

the gazebo was a tall pergola covered in grapevines that hung over the paving and part of the pool, completely hiding the neighbor’s house. The fence on the other side of the yard was hidden behind masses of bushes planted along its length.
    I switched my gaze to Harley and just knew that he’d been out here naked.
    He was messing with the barbeque, cleaning off the hotplate with some paper towel and getting the gas going. He splashed some oil onto the hotplate as it warmed up and spread it around with a spatula.
    “How do you like your meat?” he called to me.
    “Medium would be great,” I replied. “Where are we going to eat? Inside or outside?”
    Harley smiled at me, and I was glad that the pool was fully enclosed, because if the man went around flashing smiles like that, I was going to walk headlong into the water by accident. “I was thinking about outside, if that’s okay with you?” He pointed to a small wooden table that was tucked under the vine-shaded pergola, next to the pool.
    I agreed. With the meat sizzling away, we grabbed plates, cutlery, salads, condiments, drinks, and napkins and set them out. The dogs, sensing that the food was about to appear, materialized at our side, wagging hopeful tails and very obviously asking to partake. Harley frowned fiercely at them and they seemed to sigh with resignation, as if they knew they wouldn’t get anything but thought it wouldn’t hurt to ask anyway. They finally flopped in a heap under a bush, out of the hot sun.
    The steaks didn’t take all that long, and soon we were sitting down with our plates piled with food. I’d made a Caesar salad, a rice salad, and a potato salad—enough to feed a small army—but we made a decent dent in the portions while we talked.
    Harley asked about my mother and her prognosis.
    “She won’t get better,” I told Harley. “At the moment, I’m coping with her at home with some help from Lisa and agency care. Lisa has Isabelle, who’s five now, and twins, who are two. She’s not really in the position to help out much. An afternoon every now and then, but that’s about it. There’s not really any time limit for Mum getting worse, we just know that she will.”
    “Is she bad now?” Harley asked.
    “She’s getting there,” I admitted. “At first it was just the loss of words she knew, the disorientation and forgetting people’s names, but now she can’t think for herself. She can’t think that it’s summer and it’s too hot to wear a jumper. She can’t think that the water in the shower is too cold and that the soap is for washing. She’s confused more often—not remembering what year it is and who she is. Frequently she refers to her father, thinking that he’s still alive, but she never really mentions her mother. At different times of the day she recognizes me as her son, but most of the time, she just accepts that I’m there to take care of her.”
    “How long has she been like that?”
    I sighed and shrugged. “Four years since the official diagnosis. It’s been three years since Dad was killed. Mum was always a bit funny for years before the official diagnosis—scatterbrained, if you know what I mean. Absentminded and easily confused. She was only fifty-nine, so none of us thought about dementia. When the doctor first suggested it, we were shocked.”
    “I know,” Harley sympathized. “Sometimes it just comes out of left field.”
    “It’s depressing,” I confided. “I’m now the parent and she’s the child. It’s not meant to be like that.”
    Harley clucked his tongue to commiserate and stood to give me a brief hug. “Do you know what you need?” he asked.
    “An all-expense-paid trip around the world?” I asked hopefully.
    He laughed. “No. Sorry. But you need to have some fun. So, let’s go swimming.”
    I looked with longing at the pure, clean water nearby. “A swim would be great,” I enthused. “But I didn’t bring my trunks. Do you have a pair I could borrow?” I