The Reckoning

She squinched her eyes at him and pushed back a hank of her iron-straight, golden hair. “You are Emmett Jamison, yes?”

Was this another symptom of her brain injury? Had she forgotten him, or was she joking around? “The last I checked, that’s me.”

She nodded. “Good. I thought so, but the way you greeted me set me off my stride for a second.”

“The way I greeted you?”

“That cheerful good morning grunt.”

“Oh.” She was joking around. “Sorry.”

Her hand waved. “No apology necessary. I’m not much of a morning person myself. It’s just that after I came out of my…condition, I found myself often confused by new and unfamiliar faces. So I learned to gauge whether I was already acquainted with someone by the warmth of their response to me. Yours was a sort of stranger-type grunt.”

Funny, how she could make him half grin and feel guilty at the same time. Then more guilty when he saw that she was staring at the now-empty coffeepot. “Let me,” he said, starting to rise.

“No, no, no.” She waved him down again. “I can do this. I can make coffee. We had a practice kitchen in rehab. Like kindergarten class, you know? We played house in order to relearn how to do simple tasks.”

He watched her trudge to the counter. She pulled close the bean grinder he’d left on the tiled surface and lifted off the clear plastic top to reveal plenty of freshly ground beans. Then she removed the basket from the coffeemaker. Inside was the used filter and a mess of wet grounds.

She stared at them. Then her gaze moved to the grinder. Back to the full basket.

Like yesterday in the grocery store, he could feel the confusion radiate off her slim body. Her spine became as straight as a steel rod, and her shoulders looked stiff. Something in the middle of his chest hurt.

He was almost out of his chair when she spoke, her voice tight. “Remind me again. What should I do?”

Breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding slid out of him in a silent whoosh. “Throw the old grounds and filter into the wastebasket under the sink,” he said, careful to keep his voice free of anything but information. “We put the fresh filters in that clear jar over there by the grinder.”

She crossed to the sink and he watched her reach for the wastebasket even as he pretended not to. He held his breath again and caught himself—barely—before telling her not to throw out the plastic basket along with the old filter and beans.

She caught herself—barely—before doing just that. Emmett let out a silent cheer as she rinsed the basket and then crossed back to the coffeemaker. “I knew that,” she said conversationally as she fitted in a clean filter. “That part about throwing away the used filter and grounds. But we’d only practiced with a clean coffeemaker in rehab and little things like that can stump me. I know there’s something I should do, and if it was on a multiple-choice test, I would recognize the answer. But sometimes I can’t dredge up the information from wherever it’s sleeping in my consciousness.”

His chest was hurting again and he said the first thing that came into his head. “I admire you for being able to ask for help. That can’t be easy.”

“It isn’t easy.” She finished preparing the coffee, then set the switch to On. “I don’t want to need help. I don’t want to admit I need help almost as much. But it’s a fact of life until I get more practice.”

She moved to the oven and set the timer, then turned to meet his gaze. “Strategies. Props. That’s how I get by. One of my strategies is to set a timer to remind myself to stay on task. Five minutes for coffee. When it goes off, I’ll check the maker. Without the alarm I might sit here for a while and never remember what I’m waiting for. Unless I write it down in my notebook—another of my favorite props.”

Her matter-of-factness was just something else to admire. No whining, no play for pity. The counselors at her rehab facility had told him about Linda’s strategies and props in order to prepare him for helping her out—and they’d also let him know that she was well on her way to needing them less and less—but they hadn’t prepared him for how watching her use them would leave him feeling so…

There weren’t words for it.

So, ignoring that ache in his chest, he grunted again and pulled a section of the San Antonio paper in front of him. He didn’t look up until the kitchen alarm went off and she was back at the table after filling up his mug and then her own.

“Thank you,” he said.

“That’s my line,” Linda replied. “I don’t think I was that good at being grateful pre traumatic brain injury, but it seems to be another skill I’m slowly learning to acquire.”

“You don’t—”

“I am, Emmett. Grateful and beholden. To the Armstrongs. To you. I don’t know how I’ll ever repay any of you.”

“Linda—”

“Don’t tell me I’m wrong. My brain isn’t that dead.”

“Wait a sec—”

“Oh, come on.”

“But—”

“Emmett, what could you possibly get out of this situation?”

“Lessons in how to edge a word into the conversation when sharing the breakfast table with a woman?”

Her velvety blue eyes rounded over the rim of her coffee mug. Then she laughed. “Okay. Apologies next.”

“Those are unnecessary, too.”

“Well, I’m certain you don’t need practice facing women across a breakfast table.”

“What about across a kitchen table?” He leaned back in his chair to study her. “Outside of my mother, you might be my first, come to think of it.”

Her eyes registered surprise again. “No wife? No ex?”

“Never married.”

“Fiancée?”

He shook his head.

“No lovers?” she asked, her eyes rounding even more.

“Of course I’ve had lovers!” Maybe she was joking around again, but he discovered his ego couldn’t take the chance.

“Ah.” That little smile playing around her mouth told him she had been joking after all. “But no long-term lovers. Nobody you wanted to share a bathroom or a breakfast with.”

“I’m a pretty solitary guy. Have been my whole life.”

She nodded. “How old are you?”

“Thirty-one.”

“Hah,” she said, that little smile reclaiming her pretty lips. She put one elbow on the table and leaned toward him. “I’m older than you. Maybe you can learn something from me.”