The Widow of Conard County Read online

  Thank you, Kevlar.

  He touched the side of his head where he could still feel the scar. He’d discovered he was lucky to have that injury. A lot of guys with no outward injury at all were suffering from the same thing with nothing to prove it. If you didn’t have an injury, but had concussive TBI, you were apt to be dismissed as having post-traumatic stress disorder. Like that was somehow less important.

  Damn, the frustration was building in him again. He tossed on the bed, tried to quiet his mind and failed.

  There’d been times when he’d felt exactly like a guinea pig. Try this, try that, let’s see what works. He’d actually been glad when they’d judged him fit enough to be sent back to the world.

  Which basically meant he could put a lid on his temper and function passably enough in society, at least superficially. He was a success story, a box checked off on someone’s list somewhere. Come back in a year for a follow-up.

  He could, if he wanted to, get bitter. But he apparently wasn’t the type. He did, however, get royally frustrated. Remembering who he had been and comparing it to who he was now made it hard to control his temper sometimes.

  He wasn’t sure about this arrangement with Sharon, either. How long would she be able to put up with him? Would he leave here in a couple of days feeling worse about himself?

  It was possible, and the thought of that was almost enough to make him get up, grab his pack and hit the road again. He wasn’t in the best shape for dealing with new problems.

  He hated admitting that to himself. Recognizing limitations like this was new to him, and it didn’t fit with who he felt he should be. Damn, he used to lead men in battle. As a senior NCO, he used to organize his squad’s operations. He used to do a lot of stuff he didn’t think he could do anymore.

  Now here he was depending on a widow’s charity. That made him feel small. But then he remembered the teasing way she’d poked his biceps and said she needed his physical strength.

  Yeah, she probably did. She was strong in a lot of ways, of that he was certain, but she was still a bit of a mite, size-wise, and probably could use some muscle around here.

  That made him feel a bit better. He’d just see how it went. That was pretty much the way he had to live now: see how it went.

  It might go okay, and he owed that woman something because she was his best friend’s widow.

  Tired of struggling for sleep, he rose and walked to the window, looking out at the moonless night. This wasn’t how he and Chet had talked about him visiting here when they could set it up. No, it had been the two of them and the promise of a great time, drinking a few beers, helping build that castle in the air, fooling around.

  He’d imagined them walking around the ranch together while Chet showed him everything he’d been talking about. He’d imagined helping paint and put up wallpaper and fixing the front-porch railing Chet insisted was too loose.

  The front-porch railing. Suddenly, he remembered those posts in the barn. Maybe that w-s what they were for. He’d ask Sharon tomorrow.

  For the first time in a long time, he had his own plans for the morning: fixing a door and figuring out the porch-rail problem.

  That felt good, too. And while he stayed at the window sleepless for a long time, neither the anxiety nor the frustration returned.

  He had a plan.

  Chapter Three

  The morning dawned dismally, with a heavily pregnant gray sky and occasional spits of rain. Sharon showered and dressed, then headed downstairs. She was surprised to find Liam was already up, bent over the door frame diagram. He looked up, the furrows in his brow fading into a small smile as he saw her.

  “Getting anywhere?” she asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “Yeah, that was my feeling, too, when I looked at it last night. You’re looking at someone who has trouble following directions for putting together a piece of pre-made furniture.”

  “Really? You’re not just saying that?” For an instant, his light green eyes looked suspicious.

  “No, I’m not just saying that. Chet teased me mercilessly about it. My excuse is that women aren’t as good as men with spatial perception. I finally got so I could do better without following directions.”

  A chuckle escaped him. He waved the printout. “This is as bad as a puzzle.”

  “I’m lousy at them, too. Bring it out to the kitchen and we’ll try to sort it out while I make breakfast. Bacon and eggs?”

  She made coffee first, then they sat with mugs at the tile-topped table and pored over the diagram while bacon sizzled. Finally, Sharon jumped up. “I’m going to get a highlighter. Maybe we can ignore the stuff we don’t need better that way.”

  She didn’t tell him she had figured it out. She just wondered how much more damage they were going to do by tearing out the old wood. Ah, well. They did, after all, have directions for building a whole new frame, if necessary.

  When she returned, he surprised her by taking the highlighter from her. “All we need to do is remove the strip I split.” He put his finger on the piece on the drawing, then sat back studying it.

  She let him take the lead, rising from time to time to put on some fresh bacon. She made a lot of bacon because he looked like a man with a large appetite. “Eggs?” she asked.

  “Three, please.”

  Yup, big appetite.

  But the really important thing was what she saw unfolding at the table.

  “You got a different color of these?” he asked, holding up the highlighter.

  “Dozens. Let me get them.”

  “A pen, too,” he said.

  She hurried to her office and returned with a box of fluorescent highlighters and a pen and pencil.

  “Okay,” he said. “Can you write the key? All I want is an order based on the colors.”

  “I can do that.” She grabbed a magnetic pad from the refrigerator and watched while she kept an eye on the eggs.

  “Check me if you think I’m wrong,” he said, then started by highlighting the piece they needed to remove.

  “That’s number one. Yellow.”

  She wrote that on the pad. The process continued slowly as they ate their breakfasts and drank more coffee, but she felt a huge pleasure that she didn’t have to step in. He was indeed figuring it out on his own. Bit by bit, he highlighted different actions in the exploded diagram until he had them all.

  “Except,” he said as he reached for the last piece of toast, “we have to do part of this in reverse.”

  “Remove that one piece, you mean?”

  His eyes were smiling as he looked at her. “Yup.” His sense of achievement was almost palpable.

  She leaned over, studying the diagram and comparing it to the key. “That’s not too hard.”

  “It shouldn’t be.”

  “Except for pulling out that piece. If I get a pry bar we’re apt to make a bigger problem.”

  “True.” He frowned in thought as he chewed. “Something so simple shouldn’t be so difficult.”

  It almost sounded as if he were talking to himself, so she didn’t answer. As it was, given how he had spoken about himself, she was pretty impressed by how he had worked out the problem.

  “Fix the door,” he said, this time clearly to himself. He was helping himself to focus, she supposed, given what he had said yesterday about talking to himself so he wouldn’t lose track of what he was doing. She couldn’t imagine what that must be like. Well, on second thought, maybe she could. How many times had she walked around looking for a pair of scissors while thinking about something else, ensuring she didn’t forget what she wanted by making a scissoring movement with her fingers. Maybe that could be like what he was doing, only he had to do it more often.

  “Finishing nails,” he said, looking at the diagram and stabbing his
finger at the tiny nails. “It must be attached by finishing nails. Painted over so we can’t see them. They shouldn’t be hard to pull. We just have to be gentle.”

  Then he beamed at her, problem solved. “I can do this.”

  So she let him.

  * * *

  She just walked to the back of the house, saying she had some bills to pay, and left him standing there. Left him to complete the job on his own, as if she believed he could do it. He would have felt a whole lot better if he’d believed that himself.

  Beside the doorjamb, tacked to the wall were the diagram and the key. The key was an especially important reminder, and he suspected she had written in clear block letters only to make it easier on him.

  But now the anxiety crept back in, a load of self-doubt badgered him and mocked him. For so long now he’d been learning what he couldn’t do, and learning actually very little of what he might be able to do, especially with some practice. He’d been diminished in part by the trauma, and in part by all the lessons and warnings thrust at him.

  In response to the anxiety, anger lit a short fuse and he had to clamp down on it. He hated this. He hated living with constant doubts and uncertainty. He didn’t so much mind failing at something as he did fearing that he might.

  It sometimes made him want to smash his fist into a wall.

  But smashing a wall would only frighten Sharon, would only make another job for him to solve and it wouldn’t fix the damn door he was staring at.

  He’d figured out the diagram, which had looked like so much spaghetti at first. If he could do that, he could follow through on the job.

  Just do it.

  That voice came from the past, from a time when matters of life and death had been staring at him in the face. Just do it. Quit being a coward.

  He’d never been a coward. Afraid, sure, but a coward? No. That word spurred him as few others could have, and he reached for the pry bar and the piece of wood he was going to use to spread the pressure to avoid damaging more of the door frame.

  He could do this. He just had to believe it.

  In the end, with the directions to follow, it turned out to be easy. He just kept moving one step at a time. And with each step, he felt a whole lot better.

  * * *

  Sharon sat in her office with a textbook open in front of her, one she hadn’t had a need to review in a while. It provided a decent overview for recognizing cognitive impairment and working with it. Of course it was designed for teachers dealing with students, and for all she knew, this could be a very different situation.

  The book led her to some further research on the web and she spent more than she probably should have buying copies of relevant journal articles.

  She had no delusions that she would be able to help much. Liam’s situation was far beyond the scope of her training and experience. But at least she could have some idea of what they were dealing with here, and maybe the things to avoid, if nothing else.

  And all the while she was reading, at the back of her mind she was waiting for the cussing to begin. Chet used to say a man couldn’t do a job without a little colorful language. She’d grown used to the air turning blue around him when something didn’t go right, and she expected to hear at least some of it from Liam.

  She heard none, and that began to trouble her. Had he just walked out, unable to deal with the door and angry at himself? Or worse, feeling like a failure?

  But every time she nearly jumped up to go out there, she’d hear another bang, or the sound of some tool, and would settle back into her chair. She had told him to let her know if he needed anything.

  Looking out the window across the yard between the house and the barn, she saw that the sky outside was turning even darker. A storm was brewing. Good. They needed the rain desperately.

  Inevitably, she remembered how much she and Chet had loved to sit on the porch when a storm approached, feeling the breeze stiffen and the air cool while thunder marched steadily closer. The wildness of storms had always appealed to her, and thinking about those lazy afternoons with Chet felt bittersweet. Good memories, gone too soon.

  She sighed, leaning her chin on her elbow, and just let her mind wander. So often she simply tried to avoid remembering because that was the best way to avoid the pain. But with time, the quality of her grief had changed. Yesterday when Liam had arrived, Pandora’s Box had opened, and the grief had been fresh, excruciating and very real.

  Today, though, it had gentled, allowing her to remember the good things, not just the loss. She didn’t want to lose those good memories, and given that Chet had been away so much during their marriage, there weren’t exactly a whole lot of them. Once she had actually counted how many days they had been together since their wedding, actually together, and seven years of marriage had totaled up to less than an entire year of days.

  They’d had Skype, they’d written countless emails, even had quite a few phone calls, but in the end they’d shared the same space for such a small amount of time that she found it hard to believe. Painful, too. They’d spent so much time looking forward, planning for when they could always be together, she wondered if they hadn’t missed some of the “now.”

  But how could she really say that? Dreams were the fuel of life, and how they had dreamed. Lots and lots of shared dreams.

  “I finished.”

  Liam’s voice startled her out of her reverie and she jumped. How had she not heard him approach?

  “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “It’s okay. Just lost in thought. Did you say you were done. Already?”

  He shrugged. “I think it’s been a couple of hours. Come look. If you don’t like it, I can maybe do something.”

  She glanced at the time on her computer and realized he was right. The morning was nearly gone. A loud rumble of thunder finished waking her from her preoccupation. “Sounds like it’s going to get bad,” she remarked.

  He nodded, then stood back to clear the doorway for her. She walked ahead of him to the front door and stood there in amazement. She wasn’t sure what she had expected but it was not an absolutely perfect repair job. All it needed now was paint. He’d even put the hook back.

  “Wow!” She turned to him with a grin. “That’s a beautiful job! Why wouldn’t I like it?”

  He kind of tipped his head, almost as if to say he didn’t know. Maybe he felt he couldn’t judge it. Maybe the cancer of uncertainty was just eating him alive. That troubled her, especially after the way he’d burst into her life, seeming so determined and so frank about his problems.

  But then she remembered from her research that people with TBI often experienced mood swings. Yesterday he’d been bursting with energy. Today he just seemed tired.

  She looked at the door again, at the diagrams beside it, and considered how taxing it might have all been for him. How would she know?

  A crack of thunder shook the house. He winced and reminded her that he had more than one trauma behind him. Loud noises were probably uncomfortable for him. They had become so for Chet.

  “Let’s celebrate,” she said impulsively.

  “Celebrate?”

  “Sure. You fixed my door and you did it perfectly. I couldn’t have done that.”

  “Don’t patronize me.” His response was almost sharp, but not quite.

  Stymied, surprised, her mouth opened a bit. Then she shook her head. “I wasn’t patronizing you, I was complimenting you. And I’m quite serious. I don’t think I could have done it. My deep, dark secret is that I’m not handy at all. Let’s go make some cocoa. From the sound of that thunder, it’s about to get chilly.”

  Without another word, she headed for the kitchen, discomfort gnawing at her. Had she made a mistake inviting this man to stay? Was he that unpredictable, that sensitive? A ticking emotional time bo
mb?

  It really sank home then that she was out of her depth, and that Chet’s best friend might not be at all the same man anymore.

  How could she have failed to consider that? God, she felt like an idiot.

  But even as she began to pull things out of the cupboard and the refrigerator, one certainty stayed with her: she wasn’t going to be the one to throw this man out, back on an empty road with no place to go.

  She was already heating and stirring the cocoa on the stove when she heard him limp into the kitchen.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I told you I have a temper problem.”

  “If that was temper, it’s nothing. Seriously, I wasn’t patronizing you. I was truly impressed.” She didn’t look up from the pot.

  “Thank you. That’s the correct answer, right?”

  She looked at him at last. “Sit down. Cocoa will be ready in a minute. Then we can talk and maybe figure out how to get along.”

  “If I’m causing a problem...”

  She wasn’t going to stand for that. “Cut it out. I said we’ll talk. Unless you’re in a rush to hit the road again.”

  This time he didn’t say a thing, just pulled a chair out and sat.

  Okay, this was going to be an interesting experience. Having a total stranger in the house would be enough by itself, but one whose reactions were a little unpredictable might be something else.

  She closed her eyes a moment before lifting the pot from the stove and pouring cocoa into two mugs. Chet, she reminded herself, would want her to do this. More, she was beginning to realize that she needed to do it for herself. It might make her feel like something more than an automaton, a biological machine that moved through the days too often on autopilot.

  Since Chet’s death, she had avoided any real emotional investment. Even with her students. She still did all the right things; she still cared about them, but not with the same depth. In short, she had become a bit crippled. Maybe it was time to deal with her own issues, too.