I cleared my throat. “Someone I was seeing suggested I come here.”
“Mm. What made you take the suggestion?”
“We had a disagreement about it. She thought I needed help dealing with some things. I disagreed.”
“But you’re here.”
“Yeah.”
“What changed?”
I looked at my hands. “Maybe she was right.” The words went down like glass.
“What kind of things did she think you needed help with?”
“Grief. Loss. The usual.” I tried to make it light, like everybody walked around carrying eighteen years of it. “She thinks I don’t deal with things. That I put them on a shelf and keep moving.”
“What do you think about that?”
“I think I handle what needs handling. I’ve got a business, employees, a family that depends on me. I don’t have the luxury of falling apart every time something goes wrong.”
“Falling apart. That’s how you see dealing with grief?”
“Isn’t it?”
He let it sit. The way a man lets a thing sit when he’s giving you room to hear yourself.
“Tell me about a time you saw someone deal with grief.”
I had come prepared to talk about Alyssa. Her manipulation, the story of the woman who tricked me into this chair. I was going to hand him that story and let him assess it.
I had not been prepared to talk about my mother, at least not that soon. Yet I talked about my mother. I told him how she died. How we found her. I told him about my father down in our basement studio with headphones on, and that by the time anyone got his attention, it was over. I told him about being nineteen and seeing my father asleep on the floor by their bed. About how my father’s face changed the day my mother died. Unrecognizable.
“Tell me what you saw.”
“His face was the wrong shape.”
“Mm.”
“I’d seen my father’s face every day of my life. I knew the shape of it. The shape was different. That the man who raised us wasn’t in the room anymore. His body was. The man wasn’t.”
“What did you do with that?”
“I started answering the phones.”
“The phones?”
“The label. He’d stopped running it. People kept calling and somebody had to answer. So I started answering.”
“At nineteen.”
“At nineteen.”
He was quiet a moment.
“That’s a great deal of responsibility for someone barely an adult.”
“Someone had to step up.”
