10. Brains – Button
His favourite jacket has mismatched buttons. Brains has never been good at keeping things like spares. He always has something else on his mind, something more he should be thinking about. So those little plastic bags that come with new clothing, containing delightful spare buttons, are always lost. They disappear somewhere into the oblivion that is his bedroom or his lab. After all, jacket buttons are far less important than particle physics or mechanical engineering.
This particular jacket, though, cannot be thrown out. It cannot be cast aside. It cannot be replaced. Every time a button has fallen off, Brains has replaced it with whatever he can find – and not all of the replacements are particularly matching.
There's a cream button with a pearlescent sheen. There's a navy one with a chunk missing from the side. There's also a reddish-brown button that has two holes, while the others have four. All together on a brown tweed jacket that originally had matching fabric-covered buttons.
Brains doesn't care that they don't match. He doesn't care that the buttons are all strange, a disharmony on his chest. What matters is that he can still wear the jacket, can still button it up, nice and snug around his waist.
Kayo bought him the jacket many years before. Just out of the blue, totally unsolicited.
"I saw it and I thought you'd like it," she had said. "If you don't like it, I can bring it back."
But he had liked it – more than she would ever know. Not only was it a nice jacket, not only did it fit him well, but it said something else. It said that Kayo had been thinking about him.
It was a jacket he would wear even after the elbow patches had started to fray and the hems were worn. Why?
Because it reminded him that he was worth thinking about.