Chapter 1
Navy SEAL Harper Cunningham sometimes came back from his SEAL Team 3 deployments and stayed a couple of days in the Coronado area with his best friend and fellow SEAL, Hamish McDougall. Hamish was on SEAL Team 5. The two were on opposite rotations, so Hamish was usually home, getting ready to do a work up for their next tour, when Harper returned. Both teams worked the same field: the Mediterranean and Northern Africa to the bulge, parts of Spain, and the Canaries.
Today, Harper wanted to go straight home—a long ten-hour drive up California’s valley interior from Coronado to Sonoma County. He frequently made it in less than nine hours, reaching speeds of over 100 MPH.
Today, there was some urgency to his trip. He’d gotten a message from his father’s doctor that his dad was having some difficulties in the hospital where he resided. Harper had sent him to live there when he became too difficult to handle, especially while Harper was on deployments.
The message was somewhat cryptic, yet Harper knew better than to try to reach the doctor.
When his wife, Lydia, had been alive, she would’ve gladly taken care of his dad and known exactly how to handle his outbursts stemming from his fears while losing his memory. Dementia ran in their family, Harper had learned by doing some research. He knew the signs of dementia were increasing every day, and there probably had been some kind of an incident—not life-threatening or the doctor would have said so. Nonetheless, it needed his immediate attention.
Putting it off a day or two—even though his body, his mind, his heart, and his eyes desperately needed rest and mindless beach time or buddy brews, anything other than focusing on solving some problem or emergency while running onto the battlefield—wouldn’t work. Duty and guilt at not being there when his father had one of his meltdowns, now becoming more frequent, required he do everything humanly possible to protect his dad and restore his dad’s world to calm and peace.
It was a battle of another sort, one his father was eventually going to lose, and probably soon.
Harper was full of pride at always being at the ready, no matter what. He didn’t spend a second feeling sorry for himself or wishing it wasn’t his lot in life. He reminded himself it was an honor that he had his dad, his only living relative after his mother’s suicide ten years ago.
He churned in his seat, allowing his back to pop then slowly flexing and releasing his thighs one at a time. He drove through cities and both tiny and large rural farming towns, where cowboy boots were used for work and not for looks, where hats were always dirty unless attending church or walking into the bank for a loan, which he’d done with his father many times. The farmlands were dusty. The old orchards, now brown and twisted, looked like the dark forest in the Wizard of Oz, holding boarded-up farmhouses and old childless swings hanging by one chain from a large tree in the front yard.
It was evidence that life either moved on and survived elsewhere or didn’t survive at all. Either way, it was sad to watch it spinning by his windows.
He felt sorry for the demise of the farming industry in California, felled by the politics of the Colorado River dispute, when the farmers lost to the development needs in LA and to the environmentalists in the North.
They never had a chance.
He stopped for fuel along the way, his four-door three-quarter ton diesel pickup getting almost twenty-five miles an expensive gallon. He munched on burgers he’d sorely missed on their last deployment to Africa, thick chocolate milkshakes, and, of course, coffee. He always loaded up on two or three tumblers of coffee, doctored with about a half pint of cream between them. He always ran out of cream and snap pickles or olives between fill-ups.
In those days, back when he had a wife and experienced three miraculous years he thought he’d never have, he never had problems with his dad because she knew how to charm the pants off the old guy, even though he was known for being fresh with the staff. It didn’t matter how many times they told him, due to his dementia, he never remembered and most everyone laughed it off. He was never mean, just inappropriate. That was a constant problem.
But Lydia could handle it all. She had never complained. She was an angel in every sense of the word. His dad had no long-term cognition she was gone, just kept drifting off into space more and more frequently—his way of dealing with anything he didn’t know how to take care of. He retreated more to his room and, of late, more to his TV while in bed. ...
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