Rescue Me

down, careful not to leave cheese fingers on her steering wheel. She cranked up her iPod and filled the car with My Chemical Romance. Sadie had been a fan since their first album, and she sang “Bulletproof Heart” at the top of her lungs. Sang like her life hadn’t turned to utter crap. Sang like she was carefree.
    Rocks crunched beneath her tires as she pulled to a stop in front of the dark ranch house. She hadn’t let anyone know she was coming home. She didn’t want anyone waiting for her. She just wanted to go to bed early.
    Not a single light burned within the house, and Sadie walked carefully into the living room and flipped a switch. An enormous chandelier made of a tangle of antlers lit up the cowhide furniture and huge rock fireplace. Framed photographs of her with her mother and father were placed on the different tables. Those same photos hadn’t moved since her mother’s death twenty-eight years ago. Above the fireplace hung a painting of her father’s biggest accomplishment and his greatest love: Admiral, a Blue Roan Tovero. He’d been Clive’s pride and joy, but he’d died of colic after just five years. The day the horse died was the only time she’d ever seen her father visibly upset. He hadn’t shed a tear in public, but she imagined he’d cried like a baby in private.
    She made her way to the kitchen, snagged a glass of ice, and continued upstairs. She moved past the ancestral portraits and into her bedroom. A lamp sat on the stand beside her bed and she turned it on. Light spilled across the bed, and she tossed the bag from the Gas and Go on the yellow and white spread.
    Everything about her room was cozy in a familiar sort of way. The same clock sat on the nightstand next to the same lamp with the same floral shade. The same painting of her and her mother when she was born still sat on the dresser next to a tin holding miscellaneous perfume samples she’d collected over the years. The same volleyball and 4–H ribbons were tacked to the corkboard next to the shelf holding all the runner-up sashes and crowns she’d won.
    It was familiar, but it wasn’t home. Currently, home was a townhouse in Phoenix. She’d bought the Spanish-inspired house at the bottom of the market for an insanely reduced price. Her mortgage payment wasn’t all that much, and she had enough money in her account to keep up on the payments for a while.
    She was a top earner at her current brokerage and shared sixty-five-percent commissions. The agency had assured her that she always had a job with them, but she didn’t want to be gone so long that her compensation package rolled back to a fifty/fifty split. She’d worked very hard for that fifteen percent increase.
    The problem was, she didn’t know when she would be able to return to Arizona. Four weeks? Six? She didn’t know if it would be as much as two months before she was able to pick up the pieces of her life. The only real thing she did know was that she would make sure her life would be waiting for her.
    Intact. As much as possible.
    T he next morning, she met with the administrator of the Evangelical Samaritan Rehabilitation Center in Amarillo. They assured Sadie that they were capable of providing the proper rehabilitation and care her father needed. They also assured her they were used to difficult patients. Even ones as difficult as Clive Hollowell.
    A week after she spoke to them, Clive arrived in Amarillo, fifty miles southeast of Lovett, which was sixty miles closer to home. She thought he’d be happy about the move.
    “What are you doing here?”
    She looked up from her magazine as a male nurse wheeled her father into his room, a tank of oxygen hooked to the back of the chair. He’d been at Evangelical Samaritan for twenty-four hours and looked more drawn than before. And clearly not happier, but he was clean-shaven and his hair was wet from his bath. “Where else would I be, Daddy?” God, why did he have to hassle her every day? For once, couldn’t he just be glad she was there? Couldn’t he just look at her and say, “I’m glad you’re here, Sadie girl.” Why did he always have to act like he couldn’t wait for her to leave?
    “Wherever in the hell it is that you live these days.”
    He knew where she lived. “Phoenix,” she reminded him anyway. “I brought you more socks.” She held up a bag from the Target a few miles away. “The fuzzy kind with traction on the soles.”
    “You wasted your money. I don’t like fuzzy