The Wild Road Home, Melissa Payne, EXCERPT
A beautiful and enriching novel about unforgettable love and the power of friends and family by Melissa Payne, the bestselling author of The Night of Many Endings and A Light in the Forest.
Mack Anders will do anything for his wife, Daisy. Even die. With the woman he loves fading away from Alzheimer’s, Mack fakes his own passing. The insurance makes certain that Daisy will be taken care of with dignity and comfort until the end. In a lonesome cabin in the Wyoming wilderness, he lives off the grid with nothing but thoughts of the past to keep him company and the belief that Daisy is better off without him.
Strong-willed eighteen-year-old Brandi has just been released from juvie. Willing to risk everything to save her young brother, Sy, from their unstable mother, Brandi takes him on the run. Her destination is their aunt’s house in Casper. Maybe there she can finally find a stable home for Sy. After a busted tire strands them in the remote wildlands of Wyoming, they cross paths with Mack. Brandi quickly realizes this quiet stranger might be their only hope of reaching safety.
On an unpredictable road ahead, escape brings these three kindred souls together. But the real world is closing in, and to help Brandi and Sy, Mack will have to come back to life in ways he never imagined.
July
Daisy took his breath away. Sun drifted through the curtains catching on the white of her hair and slipping down the grooves in her cheeks, igniting the gold in her green eyes. Like she glowed from the inside out. She smiled, meeting his gaze squarely, and the directness tickled his old bones the way it did when he’d first met her. God how he loved this woman.
“What’s this for?” She fiddled with the wrapper of a cupcake. He’d tried making his own, but baking had been her domain, and Mack had forgotten to use the baking soda or powder or whatever was needed to make it taste like cake. On his way here, he’d stopped at the store and bought the first ones he saw. Decorated in red, white, and blue icing for the Fourth of July. They’d been married on the fourth. Daisy had picked the date, said that if a country this divided had stayed together against the odds, it was a good omen. Forty-eight years later, both of them saddled with a loss that had torn them apart before they glued themselves back together, Mack figured Daisy’d been right.
He scooted his chair closer to the bed. “Happy anniversary, Daisy.”
She frowned and put the cupcake back in the clear plastic box. “I don’t think so.” Her gaze flitted to the window.
The bite he’d taken turned to sawdust, and Mack spit it on a napkin, stuffed everything into the box. His upper lip quivered, and Mack had to give himself a minute. He tapped a fist against a burning in his chest, coughed to keep it from escaping into his throat. “Goddang heartburn,” he muttered.
Daisy laughed. “That’s called emotion, Mack. It’s the price of love.”
He froze. It was something she’d said often to him during his heartburn episodes. A response he believed proved that she was still in there, sparking a hope that hurt worse each time it burned out. But Mack wasn’t a quitter. The doctors said she was progressing fast, that she may live only four to eight years, if that. Like that meant her life had less meaning. Mack had used the computer at the library to look it up. They were wrong. Sometimes people lived twenty years. And Daisy was the exception; they just didn’t know it because they’d never met anyone like her. Strong-willed, tenacious, able to angle a fish, gut an elk, and make the sweetest berry pie from fruit she’d foraged herself.
“Well, Daisy, love goddang burns.” He held his breath, waited for the laugh that always followed, light and tinkling like wind chimes dancing in the breeze.
She stared out the window and didn’t make a sound.
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