Page 25 of Sweet Courage

So much of what Kat could hear reminded her of the children she worked with and the little she’d been able to research on traumatic brain injuries. Such a complicated organ, but now, listening to his therapist, the seed of an idea she’d gotten when she was looking into his troubles, took root. Maybe, just maybe, she could help.

“I’m ready!” Mason bounced into the room and took his seat beside her at the table. The tug of war with not wanting to make the effort and the joy of making progress seemed to be easing for the young boy, with making progress taking the lead.

Mason’s attention span before his brain would start to cloud over and shut down was about twenty minutes. Those twenty minutes coincided precisely with when she heard the latch of the office door shut and Hanson’s booted steps coming closer. Mason followed the sound too, his pencil hovering above the worksheet. “Is Mr. Hanson done?”

“Looks like it.” Kat tapped the paper lightly. “But your job is right here, mister. One more row.”

He sighed the sigh of a boy asked to haul water uphill in July, but bent over the page again.

Hanson appeared in the kitchen doorway a moment later, laptop tucked under one arm, a half-empty glass of water in his other hand. His gaze landed on Mason first, then Alice near the sink, then finally Kat. For one brief second, something unguarded passed across his face. Not quite a smile. Not quite surprise. More like his mind had been somewhere difficult and found her standing in the easier place. Then his expression smoothed. “Morning.”

“Morning.” Kat kept her voice easy.

Alice wiped her hands on a dish towel. “How did it go?”

Hanson glanced toward Mason, then gave Alice the kind of answer men gave when they didn’t want to really answer. “Informative.”

Kat bit back a smile, turned to Mason’s last notes on the page. “Looking good.” She offered a high-five the child returned with delight and with his grandmother’s approval, the kid was out the door and racing toward the paddock and the new horse.

“Oh to be that young without a care in the world,” Alice muttered with a smile, turned and wiping her hands on a nearby dish towel, pushed away from the counter. “Have some laundry that will not fold itself. Be back in a jiff.”

“I can help.” Hanson took a step in her direction.

“No need.” Alice held her hand up. “We’d only be bumping into each other in that little room. One of these days I’m going to bump that sucker out into a decent size for this house, but for now, I can do it.” With a smile and wave, she was headed toward the laundry room.

Gathering her phonics cards, Kat’s gaze lifted to meet his. The tight set of the man’s jaw and the rigid line of his shoulders practically vibrated with cognitive exhaustion. He moved toward the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of water, moving with that same careful, hyper-vigilant control she was learning to recognize.

“The office door didn’t latch all the way. I wasn’t trying to listen.”

“I know.”

The simple trust in those two words did something inconvenient to her chest. “The therapist said something about the thread dropping.”

“Yeah. Working memory deficit.” Hanson sighed, setting the water bottle on the counter, his expression instantly guarded. “They give everything a fancy title. I just need to try harder.”

“Is that what the therapist said?”

He shook his head. “Not exactly.”

“Mm.” She considered her next words carefully. “Effort isn’t the problem. Storage is.”

He went very still.

“If your brain is having trouble holding the order of the day, maybe the order of the day shouldn’t have to live in your brain.”

His brows buckled in confusion.

She reached into the front pocket of her canvas bag and pulled out a fresh, blank stack of heavy index cards and a black marker. She set them on the counter between them. “You trusted a man on belay because the rope was there to do a job. This is just another rope.”

“Funny looking rope.” His words were curt, but curiosity danced in his eyes.

Pulling out one card, she set it down in front of him. “You write the sequence for your task before you start, step by step, on a single card. One card, one task. When the thread drops—and it will—you don’t have to rebuild from nothing. You simply check the card and move on.”

“Like a manual for life.” He looked at the cards.

“Pretty much. They can be as simple or complex as you need. As few or as many as are necessary. In time…”

“Yeah.” He sighed again. Deeper. Slowly, his hand reached out and covered the stack of cards. “Another rope.”