Chapter Three — Thursday, 12:40

On Thursdays I eat lunch in the car, parked against the chain-link at the end of the runway, where the planes come in so low you can read the numbers on their bellies. Jack sits in the passenger seat with his nose on the window and watches them land like he's grading them.

The protein bar is on the dash. I haven't opened it.

My daughter texts at 12:43. Claire, twenty-four, in Chicago, the one of my kids who calls instead of texting, which is why the text makes my stomach drop before I read it.

Didn't get the fellowship.

That's all. No emoji. Claire uses emojis the way other people use punctuation.

I type: Oh, honey. That's really disappointing. You worked so hard on that application. How are you feeling about it?

I read it over. It's a good text. It's warm, it reflects, it names the effort, it opens the door. I could put it on a slide. I send it.

The dots come up. Go away. Come up.

Dad. Don't.

A Cessna comes in over the fence, touches, bounces once, settles. Jack's ears follow it all the way down the runway.

Don't what, I almost type. I know don't what.

Her mother used to say it with more words. Don't do the voice, Dan. Standing at the kitchen island with her coffee going cold. I'm not one of your couples. I'd say I'm not doing a voice, in the voice.

I type: Sorry. That sucks. I'm sorry. Delete it. I type: Want me to call? Delete it. I type: They're idiots. Leave it for a while. Delete it.

I send: Ok. Love you.

No dots. The Cessna taxis back toward the hangars. I check the phone twice more before I start the car, and once at the light on Taylorsville Road.

The protein bar rides back to the office on the dash, unopened.

2:00

There's no script for Bev.

There was, four years ago. This is Jack. You ever been out here before? Have you ever talked to a counselor? She had not. She told me so in a tone that suggested counselors were something that happened to other people's families. She'd come because her son Wade had stopped speaking to her, and her sister had said, Bev, you need to talk to somebody, and Bev had said, I talk to everybody, and her sister had said, That's the problem.

Now she lets herself in. Jack meets her at the waiting room door with his whole back end going, because Bev keeps a Ziploc of little liver treats in her purse and has for four years. She gives him one. She gives him a second one when she thinks I'm not looking. I'm always looking.

She sits in her spot. Left end of the couch, cardigan off, folded over the armrest, purse on the floor at her right foot. She's sixty-seven. She was a court reporter for thirty-one years, Jefferson County, criminal and then family. She types eighty words a minute on a phone with one finger and she does not miss anything.

"Well," she says.

That's how she starts. She never waits for me to ask where she wants to start. She has never once let me ask it.

This week it's her sister Linda and a Pyrex dish. Linda borrowed it in July for a funeral at church and returned it in September with a crack in the lid and acted like it was always cracked. It's a good story. Bev tells it well, with voices. I've heard a version of it, with a different dish and a different crack, maybe thirty times.

I nod. I say mm. I say, "And how did that land for you?" I say it fine.

And I think about Claire in Chicago, not answering.

Here's a thing nobody puts in a novel about therapists. Some hours are boring. Some clients stop needing you and keep coming, and you keep seeing them, and you tell yourself it's because they still need it, and some of that is true. And some of it is that she pays on time and she's kind to my dog and Thursdays at two are easy, and the conversation about being finished is a hard conversation, and I've put it off since last fall.

She hasn't talked about Wade in months. I noticed that in the spring and I wrote it down and I didn't do anything with it.

Why are we still here, Bev?

I don't say it. Therapist Dan says, "It sounds like the dish isn't really about the dish."

Bev looks at me over her glasses.

"Daniel," she says. "The dish is about the dish."

2:21

She finishes the dish. She doesn't start another story. She reaches for her cardigan, not to put it on, just to straighten the fold, and says, "You moved the tissues."

I look at the side table. The box is dead center.

I always move it back. I moved it this morning and I didn't move it back.

"Did I?"

"Middle of the table," Bev says. "It goes in the middle on the bad days. It was in the middle the week your mother passed. And that whole spring, the year I started. I used to think you were putting it out for me." She smooths the cardigan. "Took me a while to figure out it was for you."

I don't say anything. Four years. She's been reading the box for four years.

"And your phone's face down," she says. "You never put it face down. You've looked at it twice. And you've said mm six times. I counted. You usually say it twice an hour, tops."

"You counted."

"Thirty-one years, Daniel. Sitting next to a witness stand typing every word anybody said. Every um. Every I don't recall. The job was to write down what they said, not what they meant. You put down what they meant, you'd be fired." She shrugs. "Didn't mean I didn't know."

There's a speech Therapist Dan has for this. It's a good speech. I appreciate you noticing. This hour is about you, though. It's correct. It's in every ethics workshop I've ever sat through. It protects the frame, and the frame protects the client.

I'm about to give it.

"Who is it?" Bev says. "One of the kids?"

Say the speech.

She's waiting. She's not worried, exactly. She has the look she must have had for thirty-one years in a courtroom: patient, unhurried, absolutely certain that if she waits long enough, the true thing gets said.

She's not asking for you. She's asking because she's been on that couch for four years and you know every crack in every dish in her life, and you have never once let her see you.

"My daughter," I say. "She didn't get a fellowship she wanted. And I texted her back like her therapist."

Bev puts her hand over her mouth. Her shoulders shake. It takes me a second to understand that she's laughing.

"Oh, honey," she says. "Oh, Daniel. Of course you did."

2:34

When she's done laughing she dabs her eyes with a tissue from the box in the middle of the table, which feels like a joke at my expense, and maybe is.

Then she says, "Wade called."

I sit very still.

"In August. The week after Labor Day. We've had dinner three times. He's got a girl now, she's a nurse, she's very nice. She's the one who made him call, I think. I don't care who made him."

August. Five Thursdays ago. Six. Pyrex dishes and church casseroles and Linda's knee replacement, every one of those Thursdays, and not one word.

"Bev. Why didn't you tell me?"

She looks at me like I'm a little slow, which, today, I am.

"Because you'd have done the thing," she says. "You'd have gotten that look, and said, It sounds like you've accomplished a lot of what you came here to do. And then we'd have had the talk about wrapping up. I've seen you get ready to do it since last fall. You get a crease right here." She touches her own forehead. "And then you don't."

She's watched me not end it. For a year.

"So I kept bringing you dishes," she says.

I thought she was stuck. That's what I'd written in the spring. Client avoidant re: son. I thought the stories about Linda were the place she went to hide. I thought I was bored because she was circling.

She wasn't circling. She'd landed. She landed in August and didn't tell the tower, because she liked the airport.

"I'm sixty-seven," Bev says. "Ed's been gone nine years. Linda's Linda. This is the one hour a week somebody listens to every word I say and doesn't need a thing from me." She shrugs. "I know you're not my friend. I'm not a fool. I just wasn't ready to give up Thursdays."

Say something true. Not the speech.

"I'm glad about Wade," I say. "I'm really glad, Bev."

"I know you are." She picks up her purse, sets it back down. "You want to know what I said to him? When he called?"

"What'd you say?"

"Nothing. I let him talk. Twenty-two minutes. I didn't fix one thing." She points a finger at me, court-reporter steady. "I learned that on this couch."

I don't have anything for that. So I don't say anything, and for once it isn't a technique.

2:49

There's no homework for Bev. There hasn't been in three years.

"Next week," she says, standing, putting the cardigan on one arm at a time. "You can do your talk. The wrapping-up talk. Crease and all. I'll be ready."

"We don't have to decide anything next week."

"I know we don't." She hoists her purse. Then she looks at me with something I've seen on her face exactly once before, the day she first told me Wade's name. "Anything else you want to make sure we cover before we wrap up, Daniel?"

My line. Four years, and she's had it the whole time.

"No," I say. "I think we covered it."

On the way out I move the tissue box back to its spot. She watches me do it and doesn't say anything, and that's its own kind of kindness.

Jack walks her out. He always stops at the waiting room. Today he doesn't. He goes out the front door with her and all the way across the lot to her Buick, and stands there while she gives him the last liver treat out of the Ziploc and turns the empty bag inside out to show him there's no more. He comes back in at a trot, very pleased with himself.

I'm not reading anything into it.

I write the note. Client reports improved contact with adult son. Discussed treatment progress and planning for termination.

It's true, technically. Every word. A court reporter would sign off on it.

I see two more clients. I don't eat. At 6:10, packing up, I find the protein bar on the dash where I left it, soft from the afternoon sun.

I sit in the car with the engine off and Jack in the passenger seat. The last of the flight school is coming in, touch and go, touch and go.

I type: That's a crappy outcome, kid. I'm around if you want to yell about it. Or not.

I read it once. It's not a good text. It doesn't reflect anything. You couldn't put it on a slide. I send it before I can fix it.

The dots come up right away.

lol. ty dad. call tmrw?

Then, a second later:

they're idiots btw

I laugh, alone in the car, loud enough that Jack looks over. Then I eat the protein bar, all of it, soft as it is, and drive home.