Free The Fallback Plan by Leigh Stein

Alice Munro about a woman named Fiona with Alzheimer’s, who falls in love with a man at the home where her husband puts her, the home where she’ll spend the rest of her days.
    I wished I were Fiona. I wished Jack and Jocelyn would get married, and then in forty to fifty years when he developed Alzheimer’s we could be institutionalized together, and fall in love, and each and every dawn would be the most beautiful dawn we had ever seen, because we would have no memory of those that came before it.

FLOATIES
    A wide golden frame, about as deep as a window box, hung on the Browns’ dining room wall. It was a strikingly ornate toy theater Amy had built. Inside, a tableau was already set so that only one play could be performed: Joan of Arc.
    A tiny Joan was attached to a tiny metal skewer that slid her back and forth along the frame. If you turned a knob on the side of the box, flames made from red cellophane erupted from the bottom. I pointed out that she was missing some angels.
    “May got ahold of the angel puppets and decided to make them bath toys,” Amy told me. “I told her it may look like a toy theater, but it isn’t a
toy
toy theater. I don’t think she got it. So in my version of the story, no angels, Joan just hears voices in her head, and gets burned to death.”
    “So your Joan is psychotic.”
    Amy sighed and nodded. “I won an award for it, back in college. I used to win all kinds of prizes.” She went up to the frame and turned the knob so the flames moved, and engulfed Joan’s tiny body.
    “Ahhhhhhhh,”
I screamed, in a small voice.
    “My voices have deceived me,”
Amy answered.
    During the first two weeks I watched May, Amy wentup into the attic and stayed there all day, while May and I wove crowns, and went wading in the kiddie pool in the backyard. When it was time for May’s nap, I would tidy up. And by tidy up, I mean snoop.
    I felt like a detective in an Agatha Christie novel. I was looking for evidence of what had happened to these people. The before and after. I wasn’t just the babysitter; I was an investigator, a collector, a memory-keeper. I was obsessed. This wasn’t benign curiosity; this was deliberate privacy invasion. My leftover acting habits. It was as if I wanted to know everything so that I could recreate them as characters in a play that would never be performed.
    I liked finding pictures of Amy that were taken when she was pregnant, because in them she looked so young and soft, so helpless and aglow. She looked more like the Amy I’d met at the party than the Amy I knew now, whose arms were sinewy, and whose face was sallow and pockmarked without makeup. If you saw the woman in the picture board your bus, you’d give her your seat. If the woman told you she was an artist, you’d imagine watercolors of waterlilies, pastorals, paintings of small children tethered to balloons.
    There was an entire album of the three of them on vacation, before Annika was born, holding one another on sandy beaches or posed in front of landmarks: the Washington Monument, the steps of the Art Institute, a lighthouse. Nate had the All-American features of a glasses-wearingJ. Crew model, and Amy was usually wearing a garishly patterned dress, a dress to show the world that even though, yes, she was a woman who stayed home with her child all day, she was not one of those women who stayed home with her child all day.
    • • •
    One afternoon Nate came home early, and instead of sending me home, Amy asked me to make some iced tea.
    May followed the three of us onto the back deck, which was covered in damp maple leaves from a recent midnight storm. She picked up a broken branch and carefully descended the stairs—two tiny feet to every step—to the yard, holding the branch ahead of her like a torch to light the way.
    “Where are you going?” I asked.
    “To get little bugs,” she said.
    “No little bugs in Daddy’s briefcase, though, okay, sweetheart?” Nate looked at me and raised