Then, I turn away from him and head for the locker room. I don’t care what anyone thinks, I’m fine and I’ll show themand my therapistas much.
4
HANNA
“There she is, my beautiful best friend,” I hear Rae call out as I step inside the coffee shop. Turning to look at her, I see she’s recently taken her braids out and is now sporting a fantastic looking afro.
“Your hair!” I exclaim with wide eyes. It’s not often I see her natural curls out on display. She tends to keep it braided or wrapped in a protective scarf.
She tucks her chin into her shoulder playing coy. “You like? Got it done this weekend.”
“I love it. You are radiant.” I pull her into a hug and give her a squeeze.
“It’s in the name.” She winks, pulling away and taking a seat at the table she saved for us.
Rae and I have been friends since meeting one another in college. She’s a few years older than me since I was so young when I got my degree but we connected on an almost cosmic level. Meeting in one of our psychology classes, there were numerous times we would get together to study or write a paper and end up spending the whole night gabbing about life, movies, or the human developmentresearch paper we had recently read for fun. We’re the type of friends who finish one another’s sentences and know what the other is thinking simply by looking at each other. While we both started out to be psychiatrists, she decided to take her empathetic heart and nerves of steel to become a social worker instead. And that line of work here in Charleston is the equivalent of becoming an angel and a superhero all wrapped up into one.
“Thanks for being willing to meet me earlier,” I say, sitting down in my own chair with my freshly ordered coffee.
“Of course, my love. Anything I can do to be able to see your smiling face. I would be sad if our weekly coffee dates didn’t happen anymore.”
We have been meeting up at the same coffee shop for the last year every Thursday morning as a little pre-weekend celebration. Her work sometimes keeps her busy on the weekends making getting together when I’m not in the office hard. After not seeing one another for nearly two months, we instituted our weekly coffee dates to make sure it didn’t happen again. The only reason either of us can cancel is if we get pulled into a work thing or are no longer breathing. Even if we’re sick, we’ve made it clear that it’s on the other to grab a coffee and come sit bedside with whichever one of us is sick.
“This might need to be our new meeting time unless my 9:00 a.m. wants to reschedule moving forward,” I say before taking a sip of my latte.
“They didn’t set this appointment time?” she asks, curling her brow at me.
“Not this time. Normally my patients set their own times but this appointment was made for the patient.” I’mcareful about what I share so as to not break doctor patient confidentiality.
“Is this some sort of conservatorship thing?” Her voice is incredulous.
I tip my head to one side and shake my head at her. “No, it’s not. And I can’t say much but I know that this particular person might not even show up this morning. The way their chief sounded on the phone, I’m half expecting to be stood up and we would have met earlier for nothing.”
“Chief?”
I squeeze my eyes shut realizing what I said.
“Doctor, police officer, or firefighter?” She lists off the options based on the one single detail I accidentally let slip.
I take a breath and speak into my coffee cup before taking another sip. “Firefighter.”
“Ooooooh, the cutest one,” she jokingly exclaims, batting me on the arm with her hand. “Unfortunately not as wealthy as a doctor but we can forgive that.”
“What do I care how much money they make?”
“You’re right, you’re right. We don’t care about that.” She settles into her seat and looks at me with a soft smile. “Firefighter, huh? Those can be tough. They see a lot on the job.”
“Not as tough as social workers,” I quip, knocking shoulders with her. This earns me a laugh.
“You got that right.” When she gives me a sharp nod of her head her hair bounces with the movement.
She isn’t wrong in her assessment, though. First responders see more in their day to day than most people see in their entire lives. And then they’re expected to go home at the end of the day and pretend like the images and sounds from work don’tcome home with them. It’s a marvel so many of them work in the field as long as they do without consistent counseling. The rise in mental health crises in the field is why I put my name on the shortlist of professionals in the area willing to work with the city’s unions to give these people affordable mental health care.
“You think they’ll come?” she asks, taking a sip and looking at me through her lashes over the brim of her coffee cup.
“I hope so. And if they stand me up, I’ll just do paperwork and prep for my session after.”
I smile to myself knowing that one of my favorite clients of the week comes to see me on Thursdays. He might be grumpy and pretend like he hates coming to me, but I know he’s warming to me. Conrad Miller might act like a hardened soul, but he’s more like a turtle than anything else. Hard exterior with a soft inside you fall in love with once he pops his head out of his shell.
