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“You’re right. Now, how did you get here again?”

“You know what I mean,” she said.

“I think it’s smart to wait. When you have sex, you’re putting a lot of trust in that person, and I don’t want to see you get hurt. When I was your age, my boyfriend—”

“Stop!” She put her hands over her ears. “I don’t want to hear anything about your sex life.”

“I was just going to tell you about how my high school boyfriend broke my heart.”

“Don’t want to know.” She took her hands off her ears.

“I’m only trying to help.”

“I don’t need your help. I already decided I’m not going to have sex now.”

“Good. Then you won’t make the same mistakes with boys that I made.”

“I wouldn’t anyway. I’m more mature than you were,” she said callously. She squeezed her zebra one more time, then dropped it on the floor. “And I stand up for myself with men.”Ouch.“Can you go now? I’m really busy,” she said, dismissing me. Then she grabbed her headphones and went back on her computer. What happened to my sweet, respectful kid who hung on my every word? Female mice are smart. Sometimes they eat their babies right after they’re born.

JIM

When I get to my office, I discover the door was left unlocked. I hope nothing was taken. I have been doing everything wrong lately. I haven’t been there for Maggie or my patients. I’m failing at everything.

When I open the door to the waiting room, I find a woman in her mid-fifties reading a magazine. She’s one of my new patients. Cheryl apologizes for being early, but as she’s new to therapy, she didn’t know if I had paperwork for her to fill out. I introduce myself and tell her it’s fine, and I’ll be with her in a few minutes.

After I’m in my office with the door closed, I lay my briefcase down under my desk and sit down. I take a few deep breaths into my lungs and blow them out through my mouth. I feel confined, like an animal in a trap waiting either to be freed or die. I wonder how much longer I can keep this up. The voicemail light on my phone is blinking quickly, rhythmically, screaming for me to check it, but I don’t.

After ten minutes, I open the door and usher Cheryl in. She’s wearing Ugg slippers, flannel pants that could be pajamas, and a sweatshirt. Her face is perfectly made up, almost as if she just left the makeup counter at the mall. The scent of Ralph Lauren’s Romance permeates the waiting room. Maggie’s worn the same scent for years. Cheryl looks around, not sure where to sit. I motion for her to take a seat on the couch, thereby taking that big decision away from her. She’s grateful. Before she sits down, she picks up all the throw pillows and moves them into the opposite corner. Then she fluffs up the bottom cushion and sits down. She leans heavily on the arm of the couch, bringing her legs up under her. She takes four tissues out of the box on the side table and crumples them up in her left hand. A small puddle is forming in the lower part of her eyes. I can see she’s ready for her emotions to come flying out.

“So, what brings you in today?” I ask in as reassuring a voice as I can muster.

“I don’t know where to begin. …” she says, but then immediately lunges into a story as if it’s been bottled up for weeks. Like a popped cork that is letting the bubbles of the champagne escape into the atmosphere. I know it’s wrong, yet as she’s going on and on, I tune out. When I tune back in, she’s saying, “And he’s never home. If I knew marrying a heart surgeon was going to be like this, I might not have married him.” She grabs another handful of tissues. At this rate I may have to get a new box. She continues, “I like my job, but I’m home by five, and our daughters are in college, so I sit home and wait for my husband to get back, and I never know when that will be. Sometimes he doesn’t come home until the next morning, and he forgets to call.” She blows her nose in one of the tissues and stuffs it in her purse even though there’s a trash can nearby.

“I’m sure he wants to get off by five and come home and relax with you, but he can’t because he’s trapped in the job, and everyone needs him,” I say.

“Yes, but not—” Cheryl starts to say, but I interrupt.

“Your husband has to be dealing with a lot of stress, and everyone wants him to be a certain way. He can’t be everything to everyone, and he feels like no one takes his feelings into account. People get burned out, and then functioning becomes really hard, and you fight through it, but you feel like you’re letting everyone down, and that makes things even worse,” I say.

When I finish, she’s staring at me and has peeled the polish off two of her nails. “So, you think I’m not understanding enough? I didn’t expect you to take his side. You don’t even know him.”

“I’m not taking sides.”

“So, when he started stealing drugs from the hospital and having affairs with the nurses, it was because I wasn’t understanding enough?”

“Of course none of that is your fault. Forget what I said, but next time maybe lead with the drugs and cheating stuff.”

I spent the next thirty minutes convincing her that I was wrong and shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions. By the time she stood up to leave, she was more upset than when she came in. So, her first stab at therapy had been a rousing success.

CHAPTER 9

“How come we never go away for the weekend, where we drink margaritas and you give me foot massages?” I asked Jim while I scrolled through the pages of Facebook on my computer.

“Because we have a kid and I have to work?”

“So does my friend Jenny. She has three kids, but somehow she and her husband are always leaving town.”

“Maybe their children hate them,” he said, putting down the mystery novel he was reading.