Chapter Three — Tuesday, 4:00

Raymond and Lorna come every other week now. That was Lorna's idea, in August, the Tuesday after they told me they'd decided to keep deciding. "Every week makes it feel like we're sick," she said. Raymond said every other week made him nervous. They agreed on every other week, and Raymond is nervous about it, and says so, which a year ago he couldn't have done.

Today is a good one. They came in one car. Raymond is in a sweater Lorna bought him at a thrift store in Bardstown that he clearly hates and is wearing anyway, and he tells me so in the first five minutes, and Lorna laughs, and he looks pleased that she laughed.

They went to the lake in July, the one from when the kids were small. It was strange without the kids, as they'd predicted. On the second night it rained, and the cabin roof leaked into a saucepan, and they played gin rummy by a battery lantern because the power went out, and Lorna won eleven hands in a row and Raymond accused her of cheating and she said, "Prove it."

"I couldn't," Raymond says. "That's the thing. I still can't."

Lorna grins at the floor.

They talk about Deb, who is coming in for Thanksgiving and bringing, God help everyone, the chili. They talk about a hospice family Lorna sat with last week, a farmer's widow out past Shepherdsville who made Lorna take home a dozen eggs. Lorna tells it in the plain way she tells them all, and when she's done, Raymond doesn't say anything for a while. Then he says, "That's a good one, Lor," and she looks at him.

It's the thing Deb used to say. That's a hard one, Lor. He's changed one word and he doesn't know he's doing it, and she does, and neither of them says so, and I don't either.

At the end, Raymond asks me, the way he always asks now, half joking: "Am I doing better?"

"What do you think?"

"I think I'm doing better."

"Then you probably are."

He laughs. "You always do that."

"I know."

They leave in one car. Jack makes it to the waiting room and stops there and watches them go through the glass, his tail moving slowly, the way it moves now.

I write the note. Couple reports improved connection; discussed recent travel and family visit. Continue biweekly. I have Raymond's chart open on the screen, so I scroll up, the way you'd reread an old letter. Last October, after their second session, I wrote the treatment plan. Under Formulation there's one line I remember being pleased with:

Partner A responds to uncertainty by imposing structure.

It was a good formulation. It held up all year.

7:15 p.m.

I stay late. I tell myself it's to finish notes. Gary sticks his head in at six to say he's leaving, and sees the banker's box open on my desk, and says, "Spring cleaning?" and I say something about my mother's papers, and he says, "Ah, man," in the kind voice, and leaves.

By seven I've got sixty more cards on the desk in rows.

The theory is still holding. Mostly. A few more names I can almost place. A boy and girl who I'm fairly sure ran a restaurant together in the Highlands for twenty years. A woman whose name was on a church sign once. I write them down.

The ones that don't fit are a problem, though. About a third of the cards are two boys, or two girls. I sat with that for a while at 6:30 and decided she must have paired friends too. Children she thought would be good for each other. That fits her. It's in keeping with a woman who wrote cards about which teachers should never share a lunch duty. I wrote friends? at the top of a new column and moved on.

At 7:15 I pull a card from near the back of the box, and it's two boys.

RAYMOND HOLLIS — 9 — BLUE LICK — 10/81

GERALD PIKE — 9 — BLUE LICK — 10/81

I don't have to check the chart for Raymond's last name. It's been on every receipt I've printed for them for a year. Raymond Hollis. He told me once, in a session about his father, that he went to Blue Lick Elementary, a county school out past the fairgrounds that closed in the nineties. The music teacher there let him conduct the spring concert once, with a pencil for a baton. He was nine when he decided he'd run a band someday.

Under the names, her capitals:

R.: Responds to uncertainty by imposing structure. Counts things when frightened. Lines up the crayons.

G.: Same.

That's all it says about the other boy. Same.

I sit there in my office with the lamp on and the field gone dark outside the window, and the runway lights coming on in their two long rows, and Jack asleep on my feet.

Responds to uncertainty by imposing structure.

I didn't remember her writing that. I don't think I ever saw this card. I have no reason to think I ever heard her say those words. I was nine myself in 1981, and if she talked about her work at dinner I don't remember it, and she never talked about the children by name. But it's the sentence. It's my sentence. I sat across from Raymond Hollis for forty-five minutes last October and watched him explain a spreadsheet of flights to Phoenix, and I went back to my desk and typed the sentence that explained him, and I was proud of it.

Forty-six years after she wrote it, about the same boy.

There are two ways to read that, and I can feel myself wanting very badly to pick the first one. The first one is that I'm good at my job. That I saw Raymond clearly, the same way she saw him, because we were both looking carefully, and there was something there to see.

The second one is that I don't know where my sentences come from.

I put the Raymond card on the desk by itself, away from the rows. Then I pick it up again and put it back in the box, in its place, between a card I haven't read and a card I have, because if it's out on the desk I'm going to keep looking at it.

At the top of a fresh page on the legal pad I write Hollis / Pike under friends?, and then I sit with the pen over it, and then I cross out friends? and don't write anything else.

It's 8:20 when I turn off the lamp. The runway lights are still on. Nobody's flying. They leave them on anyway.