Keith (Hathaway House #11) - Dale Mayer Page 0,21

any happening. So it’s hard for me to imagine it’s even possible. So I probably should just go back to the same VA place I was at before and let somebody else make good use of being here. I don’t think I’m the right person at all.” And, with that, he spun his wheelchair and headed out of the room.

Chapter 6

Just enough of an insider grapevine existed in a place like this that Ilse had heard about the bit of a disruption in Keith’s world once he’d had the psych visit. But then she could understand why he wouldn’t want anybody questioning what he said or saw or thought or felt. She just happened to be walking down the hallway to Dani’s office, when she heard the sound of a wheelchair moving rapidly behind her. As she pivoted, she saw Keith turn into his room and slam the door behind him. Hard. She winced at that.

As she got to Dani’s office, she was happy to find her in and not in a meeting.

Dani motioned to the chair across the desk, as she was on the phone. She quickly finished the call. “Problems?”

“Nope,” Ilse said. “Just bringing up the budget and supply invoices for the last month.” She handed them to Dani, who took a quick look.

“You always seem to be on target.”

“That’s the job,” she said with a laugh. “You wouldn’t like it if I came in saying I needed an extra fifteen hundred dollars this month.”

“No, but it wouldn’t surprise me,” Dani said. “It seems like everybody needs an extra fifteen hundred dollars right now.”

“Right,” she said with a nod. “That was a pretty hard door slam a few moments ago too,” she said. “It was Keith, but I have no idea what’s wrong.”

Dani clicked her mouse, frowned at her monitor, and said, “Well, I have a pretty good idea,” she said, “but I may go talk to him later, or maybe I’ll just let him work his way through it.”

“I guess a lot of that happens here, doesn’t it? Just working their way through it, I mean.”

“There is,” Dani said, her tone serious. “These guys have issues that we can’t even imagine. And yet they still manage to keep fighting the good fight. Even when I feel like I might have given up a long time ago.”

“I was thinking that earlier today,” Ilse said with a small smile. “I’m not sure I’d have the strength and the endurance to do what these guys are doing every day.”

“I know,” she said. “I watched my father for a long time. He’d get depressed and morose, angry—so angry at what life had done to him,” she said. “It made growing up pretty rough over those last few years as he tried to heal. Once we started this center, and he had a purpose, something to work toward, it made a huge difference for him. But it really was seeing something beyond the immediate future that made a difference in his world.”

“I can see that,” Ilse said. “A lot of the current philosophy says forget about tomorrow, forget about yesterday, and just focus on today. But then, if today looks pretty bad, and you can’t see that there’ll be a tomorrow that’s any better, it just makes for a really rough today.”

“It usually takes a few weeks here,” Dani said. “In some cases, as long as six weeks for the guys to realize that progress is really happening and that there really is hope for something beyond this. They come from these centers and hospitals, circumstances that are often less than ideal, or, at the very least, they’ve been allowed to wallow in the collective misery, so their mental attitude is way less than ideal. And it’s not just a physical shift but a mental and an emotional shift here. They have to let go of all that stuff, and it’s hard, really hard. A lot of them cling to it out of fear. Others cling to it like it’s protecting them because it’s what they know and is like a safeguard for when it just doesn’t get any easier.”

Ilse stood and said, “It’s hard when somebody really hits you in the heart, and you see his struggles, and his daily strength amazes you.”

“Keith again?”

Ilse nodded, shoving her hands in her pockets. “I’ve never had a patient here affect me like this.”

“It may not ever happen again,” Dani said. “You see it on a professional relationship level, as if something about him