Excerpt from Carolina Moonset by Matt Goldman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Green bandana for Joey Green. Smart." He smiled, entertained by his observation. Brown eyes squinting behind trifocals, the old kind with visible lines, his eyebrows creeping over in need of a trim.

My mother pulled me aside and lowered her voice. "I want you to drive back to Beaufort, Joey. Your father's sense of direction is…" She shook her head and pressed her lips together. "And he doesn't like it when I drive. He complained the whole way here." My mother sighed. "We were at the neurologist this morning. She changed the diagnosis. I haven't even had a chance to tell your sisters yet."

My father turned around and said, "Hey, Joey. What color is your suitcase?"

"It's navy, Dad. A roller bag with a green bandana tied to the handle."

"Green bandana for Joseph Green. Good thinking." He gave me a thumbs-up, turned around, then walked toward where the conveyer belt spit the bags onto the metal merry-go-round. He moved with small, slow steps, like a cartoon old person. Shoulders stooped. Suspenders holding his jeans on his slender hips. Bent forward as if he needed the tilt to maintain inertia.

He was only seventy-five.

I wondered when my father had started wearing suspenders and if I was too old to be embarrassed about it. And I wondered when I'd started associating the word only with seventy-five. Maybe it's because my father's parents had lived into their nineties. I looked at my mother and said, "Dad has Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, right?"

My mother shook her head. "That's what they thought, but the neurologist and internist discussed Dad's symptoms. Now they think he has Lewy Body Dementia."

"What's that?"

My father got halfway to the end of the carousel then stopped and turned to show us a most confused expression. "Carol?"

"What, Marshall?"

"What are we waiting for?"

"Joey's bag."

"I'll get it. What does it look like?"

I told him. Again. As if it were for the first time. As if my father were a small child. I had last seen him at Thanksgiving in Chicago—that's when I first witnessed his disease while driving to a restaurant in Evanston. He had said it looked like rain and we should go back to get umbrellas. I told him I'd brought umbrellas. Then five minutes later, he said it looked like rain and we should go back to get umbrellas. I said, "Dad. You just said that. I have umbrellas." He apologized. Said he was getting old. Said something about how it was going to happen to me, too, one day. We laughed it off. Then a few minutes later, he said it looked like rain and we should go back to get umbrellas. I caught my mother's eyes in the rearview mirror. She was crying.

At the Charleston airport, my mother said, "We'll talk more about it when we get home. And there is a silver lining. Dad's long-term memory isn't affected. He won't forget me. Or you. Or your sisters or his grandchildren. He's been talking nonstop about growing up here. And about when you and the girls were little. Your father has loved the simple pleasures in life, and to hear his stories about the old days, it's really quite sweet."

My mother's words were hopeful but her eyes betrayed her. She was moving forward in time as my father moved backward. She was losing her companion of fifty-one years. An hour and a half later, my father laughed at the strawberry farm story he'd just told. "Oh, you were mad Grandma put that berry in your basket!" He laughed until he cried as I drove into Beaufort's city limits.

Beaufort County is a delta of sorts comprised of the Sea Islands bordering the coast. The town is rich with antebellum charm, but much had changed since my father grew up there, and his lack of short-term memory made it seem like a tidal wave of new development had hit every time he left the house.

"Would you look at that?" he said, shaking his head. "Hammond Island has three construction cranes. I'll be damned."

Excerpted from Carolina Moonset by Matt Goldman. Copyright © 2022 by Matt Goldman. Excerpted by permission of Forge Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.