“Oh my!” she said.
“That’s the first time anything like that ever happened,” I said.
Jay went on. “The next day, she blew up her office with a vial of nitroglycerin.”
Evelyn gasped.
“He’s exaggerating,” I said quickly, knowing I’d lost all credibility as a wife
and
a therapist. “There was a small explosion, but it just broke a window and put a little hole in the wall of my reception room. It was an accident.”
“An accident?” Jay said. “Was it also an accident that one of your patients tried to run you over in the parking lot two months ago, and you ended up in the ER with a broken wrist?”
Evelyn’s mouth formed an O.
“My patient did
not
try to run me over,” I said, my irritation growing with Jay’s every word. “I was chasing him across the parking lot and I tripped.”
Jay gave a grunt. “How many near-death experiences does it take before you realize you might be in the wrong business?”
That pissed me off. “I resent that!” I said, a bit louder than I’d meant to. “I happen to be very good at what I do. Besides, who are
you
to talk about taking risks?
You’re
the one who races into burning buildings as everyone else is running out.”
He immediately became defensive. “I’m a firefighter. That’s what I do.”
“And I treat people with emotional problems.”
“You treat people who need to be locked away,” he said. “It’s like you’re on a mission to find the craziest and most dangerous patients in the world. The sicker the better,” he added.
Evelyn’s head swiveled from Jay to me and back to Jay. She reminded me of the toy dogs with the bobbing heads that people put in the back of their cars. “See what I mean?” I told her. “To hear him talk you’d think all of my patients were criminally insane when most of them are actually very boring.”
“Okay,” Evelyn said. “What I’m hearing is that each of you fears for the other’s safety because of your occupations, and that it causes discord in your relationship.”
Jay nodded.
I nodded.
“It’s harder on Kate,” Jay said, his tone softening for the first time since we’d entered the room. “Her father was a firefighter who died in the line of duty when she was ten years old.”
“I’m so sorry,” Evelyn said to me.
“Thank you,” I replied, even though I had no desire to dredge up my past.
“I try to take it into consideration,” Jay said, “but she’s still afraid. She obsesses about every little thing that might go wrong.”
“I think I handled it pretty well until you were injured,” I said.
He shook his head. “You know that’s not true. You questioned me constantly even before the accident. If I told you the truth, you fretted and begged me to quit the department. If I held back information, you accused me of being dishonest. It was one argument after another.”
I looked down at my shoes. As much as I wanted to deny it, Jay was telling the truth. The constant bickering had driven a wedge between us, and we’d stopped talking. We’d even stopped having sex. His injury almost eight months ago had been the last straw for me, which is why I’d packed my bags and left.
“Kate knew what I did for a living before we married,” Jay said.
I was not surprised by the comment. It always came down to that. My fault. “I thought I could handle it. I’m not the only wife who has fears. Why do you think the divorce rate is so high among firefighters?”
I was rewarded with a dark frown. “So why the hell did you marry me?” he asked.
“Because I fell in love with you, you idiot!” I came close to yelling.
“Time out!” Evelyn said, slicing the air with her arms like a referee. “We need to take a deep breath and calm down.”
“I have to get back to the station,” Jay said, standing. “This is going nowhere.”
“You can’t just walk out of marriage counseling!” I said.
“Don’t you get it, Katie?” he asked. “I’m tired of arguing about my job and now about your job.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying—” He paused. “I’ve got a lot going on at work right now. This just isn’t a good time for me. I’m sorry.” He opened the door and quietly let himself out.
My heart sank to my toes.
Evelyn was quiet for a moment. “Are you okay?” she asked finally.
I nodded, but I wasn’t okay. What could be more important to Jay than our relationship? “I’ll be fine,” I said.
I could tell as she reached for her appointment book that she didn’t believe me. “Why don’t we go ahead and set something up for next Monday. If you need to cancel, just give me twenty-four hours’ notice.”
I nodded, because I didn’t trust my voice.
I found myself anxiously counting traffic lights on the drive to my office. I tried not to think about the possibility of life without Jay. He was not only my lover but my best friend, and one of the most grounded people I knew. After being raised by two women who were the
least
grounded people I knew, I needed a sense of normalcy. And Jay had, despite my objections to his job, provided it.
My mother and aunt were partially responsible for my neuroses. Picture two plus-sized women, identical twins, in their midfifties, with big platinum hair and inch-long eyelashes. Even before I’d lost my father, they’d been hard-core junk dealers, which meant I’d been raised in a house surrounded by more crap than on
Sanford and Son
. Our living room made Graceland look like something out of
Southern Living
. They referred to themselves as the Junk Sisters. In school, I was known as the daughter of a Junk Sister. I’m fairly certain that’s why nobody asked me to the senior prom.
Red was their signature color. They wore red overalls and rode around in a candy apple red six-ton 2007 Navistar CLT pickup truck, which they’d purchased once their business had taken off and become a huge success. It was twenty-one feet long and capable of hauling more junk than Amtrak. Before they had arrived, as my mother liked to say, selling junk had been a hobby of sorts. My earliest memories were of me digging through the trash in ritzy neighborhoods on garbage day while they kept watch from my father’s battered truck, the engine running so we could make a quick getaway if need be. I’d been coaxed inside every Dumpster within a fifty-mile radius of Atlanta, and I knew everybody’s name at the local flea market where we rented a booth on weekends.
They had become very successful over the years, having turned their junk into sculptures, wall art, and painted furniture. Their new studio in Little Five Points drew high-end interior decorators and wealthy customers. The sign outside their store read “Junque” because my mother thought it sounded sophisticated. They made a killing.
While I was enormously proud of my mother, she and I bumped heads constantly. She often stuck her nose in my business, and she had more advice than a self-help book, even though, at thirty-two, I had read most of them. She was bossy and overbearing and could induce guilt in the best of us. I recalled her doing the same to my father. Sometimes, when I was at the end of my rope with her, I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d chosen to stay in that burning building.
I pulled into the parking lot next to my office and was suddenly overcome with a choking sense of dread. I had been served an eviction notice two months ago, a result of the aforementioned explosion. I’d spent the first month begging my landlord to reconsider. He’d agreed to give me an extra month, during which time I’d searched high and low for affordable office space. The only place that had come close was in a one-story building that housed a cab company and a lending operation called Snappy Cash, owned and operated by a seedy man named Freddie who wore white shoes and polyester slacks and had a terrible comb-over. It would have meant sharing a bathroom and kitchen space with people who appeared hygienically challenged and who were not overly concerned that one or two of their front teeth were missing.
I now had until five p.m. on Friday to find a new place, at which time my landlord planned to change the locks on my doors.
I spoke to several of the people who got on and off the elevator as I rode to my office on the fourth floor. I knew most of them since my best friend, receptionist, and self-appointed PR person, Mona Epps, held an open house on the first Monday of every month in hopes of building my practice. It was a catered event where she passed out brochures on mental health issues and saw that everyone left with my business card. Since she was rich and paid for it all, there was little I could do about it.
The events hadn’t drawn many patients, but Mona and I were well liked by the other tenants.
I heard loud singing before I opened the door leading into my reception room. Inside, I found a striking but disheveled woman in a sequined cowgirl outfit and ten-gallon hat, belting out the words to an old country song, “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” The fact that I wasn’t
surprised
to find a complete stranger performing a nightclub act in my office said a lot about what I faced on a daily basis.
Sitting at her desk, Mona gave me an eye roll. I simply stood there quietly while the woman sang, using a hairbrush as her microphone. Finally, she finished. I smiled and clapped and Mona did likewise. I’m sure we were in silent agreement that the woman would never see her name in lights.
“Who are you?” she asked me.
I noted a slight odor coming from her; like maybe she needed a hot shower and a bar of deodorant soap. “I’m Dr. Kate Holly,” I said. “You can call me Kate.” I smiled. “And you are?”
The woman looked surprised. “You don’t recognize me?” She pulled off her cowboy hat, and I almost winced at the sight of her hair, dyed coal black and chopped in an unflattering style.
Mona cleared her voice and gave me the special look we shared when weird people showed up in my office, which was often. “Kate, meet Marie Osmond,” she said. “I didn’t recognize her at first either. She looks much younger in person.”
The Marie Osmond wannabe smiled.
She looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place her. The only thing I knew for certain was that she couldn’t possibly be Marie Osmond, whom I’d recently seen on
Dancing with the Stars
.
“I’m honored,” I said, taking her hand and shaking it. I noticed her nails were dirty and chipped. There were bruises on her arms.
“Miss Osmond is reinventing herself,” Mona said. “She plans to take the country music industry by storm. And you’ll never guess what else. She has walked away from all her fame and fortune and started from scratch.”
Marie nodded. “That’s right. I gave it all up—” She paused and snapped her fingers. “Just like that. A real country western star sings about hardship, broken hearts, and old pickup trucks,” she added. “They don’t sing songs about shopping on Rodeo Drive.”
Mona gave me another of our special looks. “Marie has been looking for gigs in Atlanta, but she hasn’t had much luck.”
The woman gave a huff. “It has nothing to do with talent, of course. People would hire me in a second if I would agree to sing the old Donny and Marie songs.” She gave a massive sigh. “I swear, if I have to hear ‘Puppy Love’ again, I’ll barf up my spleen. Anyway, last night I auditioned for this guy named Rusty who owns Rusty’s Place, and he gave me your address and phone number and said you had a lot of connections.”
I blinked several times. It was a lot to take in at once, and the woman spoke at warp speed. I knew Rusty well. Jay and I often ate at his restaurant because he had the best steaks in town. Obviously, Rusty had decided the woman had serious problems and sent her my way.
“I had doubts about coming to see you,” Marie said. “I mean, I grew up in the music industry, and there’s nothing I don’t already know about the business, but as I was pulling into your parking lot I saw your phone number written in the sky with the words ‘Compassionate Friend.’ I knew it was a sign from God that I was supposed to be here.”
I nodded. Most psychologists, upon hearing about signs from God, would immediately suspect they were dealing with a psychotic or a Jehovah’s Witness. Not true in my case. Mona had hired a pilot to pull a banner over the city of Atlanta advertising my services, hoping one day I would be famous and have my own talk show.
“Well, I’ll certainly do my best to help,” I said after a moment, “but I don’t know anything about the entertainment industry. I’m a clinical psychologist.”
Marie glanced from me to Mona and then back at me. I could tell she was unsettled and probably very confused. “You’re a shrink?” she said. “Why would Rusty send me to a shrink?”
I tried to think of a good response.
“Maybe he thought we could give you the name of a good hair stylist,” Mona said.
I floundered for a reply. “Well, trying to reinvent yourself can be very stressful,” I began, “and to be perfectly honest, you look worn out.” Actually, she looked like hell.
“Don’t you
get it
?” Marie asked Mona. “I’m supposed to look like this. I’m trying to appeal to those who struggle every month to make payments on their mobile homes. I want to reach out to the person who has no one in his life to love except a Bluetick hound dog. I’m singing to the broken masses.”
“Oh, that just gave me goose pimples,” Mona said, rubbing her arms.
Marie shrugged. “Besides, I’ve been sleeping in my car.”
“That’s awfully dangerous,” I said. It probably explained why she needed a shower.
“Oh, I could stay in the fanciest hotel in town if I wanted, but that would not be true to my new image. Everything I own is in the trunk of my car, including a dozen country western outfits. You’d flip if I told you how much money I spent on them.”
I had by now realized that I was most likely dealing with a woman with bipolar disorder. “Marie, when was the last time you slept?” I asked.
She looked at me as though I were speaking a foreign language. “What day is this?”