LITMIR.BIZ

       One

      Nina Lowery just didn’t get the cowboy craze.

      Good thing she lived in Texas. All the cowboys made it easy to resist falling for any man after her marriage combusted. And never had she been more neck deep in cowboys than today as she accompanied her son to the weeklong HorsePower Cowkid Camp.

      Nina peeled the back off the name tag and stuck it to her yellow plaid shirt that was every bit as new as her boots. She knelt in front of her four-year-old son and held out the tiny vest with his name stitched on it.

      “Cody, you need to wear this so everybody knows which group you’re with. We don’t want you to get lost. Okay?”

      Silently staring, Cody kept his eyes on the ground, so she had a perfect view of the top of his blond buzz cut. He lifted his hands just a hint, which she took as the okay to slide his spindly arms through the vest, leather fringe fanning in the wind. The summer smell of freshly mown hay mixed with the sticky little boy sweetness of perspiration and maple syrup from his breakfast pancakes. Cody had them every morning. Without fail.

      They’d been running late today, so he’d eaten his breakfast in the car, dipping his pancake in a cup of syrup. Most of which drizzled all over his car seat. But after waking up at 4:00 a.m. to get ready, then driving from San Antonio to Fort Worth, she was too frazzled to deal with the fallout of disrupting any more of his daily routine. Syrup could be cleaned later.

      There were far tougher issues to tackle in bringing up Cody than combating a trail of ants.

      She would do anything for her little boy. Anything. Including immersing herself in the world of boots and spurs for seven days. Yeehaw.

      About a month ago, when her four-year-old’s eyes had lit up during a field trip to a farm, she’d been taken aback. He’d been mesmerized by the horses. So Nina had devoted herself to becoming an expert on all things equine related, desperate for a means to break through the walls surrounding her autistic son.

      Finding a pathway of communication was rare and cherished when parenting a child with autism.

      Never in a million years would she have guessed this particular world would pique Cody’s interest. Usually boisterous encounters spun him up, leaving him disoriented and agitated. Sometimes even screaming. Rocking. His little body working overtime to block the excess stimuli.

      But he liked it here. She could tell from his focus and the lack of tension in his body. She’d only seen him this way while drawing. He was a little savant with crayons and paint, finding creative canvases from rocks to boxes and, yes, walls. She even had a Monet-esque flower mural down her hall.

      Apparently he was a horse savant, as well.

      She held out the pint-size straw hat and let him decide whether or not he wanted to take it from her to wear. Textures were an iffy proposition for him. The brush of a rough fabric could send him into sensory overload, especially on a day when there were already so many new sights and sounds, horses and humans everywhere. She sidestepped to make way for a father pushing his

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