I, Gracie - Sharon Sala Page 0,12

started crying and rocking where she sat.

Gracie staggered to the phone and dialed 9-1-1.

“9-1-1. What is your emergency?"

Gracie was fading in and out of consciousness. She had to get this said, or she would die.

"Help. Help...Gracie Dunham... Mama stabbed me...crazy...dementia... blood everywhere...10473 Highway West...Help me... I..."

* * *

Gracie woke with a gasp, bathed in sweat, her face wet with tears, and then realized it wasn't sweat. Rain was blowing in the window. It hardly ever rained in July, but it was raining tonight.

She flew out of bed and shut the window, then ran into the bathroom and grabbed a towel to mop up the floor. She was halfway down the hall to her mother's room to close her windows when she remembered Mama was dead, and she'd already closed them before she went to bed.

Her heart still pounded, but her shoulders slumped as she went back to her room. She stripped off her wet clothes and the bed sheets, then made it up again with dry ones. Weary, she took everything to the laundry and started it to wash before heading to the bathroom.

The lights blinded her as she flipped the switch, then she paused in front of the mirror, eyeing her nudity. Without thinking, she ran her fingers along the thin scars on her chest, and then turned sideways in the mirror, eyeing the thicker, ropey scars on her back and shoulders. She vaguely remembered the voices of paramedics speaking in loud, frantic tones. They’d called for another ambulance to take Delia to the psych ward. Hours later, she’d woken up alone in a hospital, hooked up to machines with a continual beep, bandaged all over her upper body and frantic about her mother's welfare.

Gracie shuddered, then washed her face and grabbed a clean nightgown before going to the kitchen. She got a cold can of Coke, popped the top, and went out onto the back porch.

The rain was blowing beneath the overhang. The air had finally cooled, and so she sat down on the porch swing facing the prairie. With the rain blowing in on her feet, she drank her Coke and watched the storm.

But the dream from before wouldn't let go. She kept remembering going home from the hospital alone, and then spending hours trying to clean up the blood. But too much time had passed, and it had long since soaked into the old wood floors.

As the days passed and she began gaining strength, she gathered up everything sharp in the house, and then searched through the barn and even in the old chicken house, collecting anything that looked like a knife, then took it all up into the attic and put it in her great-granddaddy's old army trunk beneath his uniform. And still, she hadn't felt safe. So, she’d pushed the trunk into a corner and had piled it high with boxes.

After she was finally well enough to cope, she’d begun checking out places where she could put her mother for permanent care.

The shock came in finding out that none of the good places would accept Medicare or Medicaid. They wanted money. And lots of it. The care patients got in the ones that did accept it were on a level of horror she could not abide.

She couldn't sell the ranch to pay for Mama's care. It wasn't hers to sell. It wasn't even Delia's to sell. It was in a trust for James, who would inherit it all upon Delia's death. Only the heir had the right to sell. Delia had the right of occupancy for the length of her life, but ownership passed down through blood to the eldest son. The one who'd abandoned them.

Anger at the injustice of their lives had fueled her decision. She quit trying to figure out what to do with the woman who had tried to kill her and just brought her home, putting her back in her bedroom as if nothing had ever happened.

After that, she'd cooked things that hadn't needed to be peeled or cut up. They’d eaten instant mashed potatoes, or she'd baked potatoes whole. She'd bought meat already cut up from the meat department and used bagged carrots that already peeled. When she'd needed to chop up an onion, she'd used the old grater, and when she'd wanted to dice up peppers or celery, she'd cut them up with the side of a fork, or just broke them up with her hands and cooked it. She'd slept with her door locked at night and