Free The Simple Truth by David Baldacci

parties. It often meant she was the swing vote on a lot of cases, and she didn’t really mind that. She was no wallflower, and she had come here to make a difference.
    Only now was she seeing what a very great impact she could have. And the responsibility that came with such power was what humbled her. And frightened her. Made her stare at the ceiling wide awake as her husband slept soundly beside her. Still, she thought with a smile, there was no other place she would rather be; no other way she would rather be spending her life.
     

CHAPTER NINE
    John Fiske walked into the building located in the West End of Richmond. The place was officially called a rest home, but, plain and simple, it was a place for the elderly to come to die. Fiske tried to ignore the moans and cries as he strode down the corridor. He saw the feeble bodies, heads dipping low, limbs useless, encased in the wheelchairs, stacked like shopping carts against the wall, waiting for a dance partner who was never going to show up.
    It had taken all the resolve he and his father had in order to move John’s mother into this place. Michael Fiske had never faced up to the fact that their mother’s mind was gone, eaten away by Alzheimer’s. The good times were easy to enjoy. The real worth of a person came from how he acted during the bad times. As far as John Fiske was concerned, his brother Mike had failed that test miserably.
    He checked in at the desk.
“How is she today?”
he asked the assistant administrator. As a frequent visitor here, he knew all the staff.
    “She’s had better ones, John, but your being here will perk her up,”
the woman answered.
    “Right,”
Fiske muttered as he walked to the visitors’ room.
    His mother awaited him there, dressed, as always, in her housecoat and slippers. Her eyes wandered aimlessly, her mouth moving, but no words coming out. When Fiske appeared at the doorway, she looked at him, a smile breaking across her face. He walked over and sat down across from her.
    “How’s my Mikey?”
Gladys Fiske asked, tenderly rubbing his face.
“How’s Momma’s baby?”
    Fiske took a deep breath. It was the same damn thing, for the last two years. In Gladys Fiske’s devastated mind he was Mike, he would always be his brother until the very end of his mother’s life. John Fiske had somehow completely vanished from her memory, as if he had never been born.
    He gently touched her hands, doing his best to quiet the absolute frustration inside him.
“I’m fine. Doing good. Pop’s good too.”
He then added quietly,
“Johnny’s doing good too, he asked about you. Always does.”
    Her stare was blank.
“Johnny?”
    Fiske attempted this every time, and every time the response was the same. Why did she forget him and not his brother? There had to have been some deep-rooted facet in her that had allowed the Alzheimer’s to erase his identity from her life. Was his existence never that strong, never that important to her? And yet he had been the son who had always been there for his parents. He had helped them as a boy, and continued to be there for them as a man. Everything from giving them a large part of his income to getting up on the roof on a suffocating August day, in the middle of a hellish trial, to help his old man shingle their house, because he didn’t have the cash to pay someone to do it. And Mike, always the favorite, always the one to go his own way, his own selfish way, Fiske thought … Mike was always hailed as the great one, the one who would do the family proud. In reality, his parents had never been that extreme in their views of their sons; Fiske knew that. But his anger had skewed that truth, empowering the bad and subverting the good.
    “Mikey?”
she said anxiously.
“How are the children?”
    “They’re fine, they’re good, growing like weeds. They look just like you.”
Having to pretend that he was his brother and had fathered children made Fiske want to collapse to the floor bawling.
    She