Prologue

I walked to the mailbox outside of the little campsite that had grown over the last couple of decades. This is where my family lived, where I’d grown up. And in that mailbox, there should be a letter. A letter that would bring us all hope. Hope that we would one day get out of this dry little patch of the Iowa countryside and into something better.

I glanced back at the collection of small trailers, all older than most of the inhabitants inside of them. This is what my family had been reduced to.

It was all because of my dad. If that letter held the news I hoped for, I could help to make it all right again, for all of us.

Not that it was really my dad’s fault, what happened. He’d been the unlucky child to inherit the gene for Huntington’s Disease that his dad passed to him. Out of two sisters and three brothers, my dad was the only one to lose the game of Russian Roulette his parents had unwittingly played.

He and my granddad became ill at the same time. That’s when the family found o