Read Use for Free Online

had a different cause and the same result, was a cakewalk. “How did the testing meeting go?”
    “The fourth-grade teachers want more latitude.” I flipped through the mail as she spoke. “The parents’ association thinks it’s a great idea. But when their kids’ scores are low and they can’t get into middle school, who gets in trouble?” She pointed at herself with the knife.
    I still didn’t want to talk to her or anyone, but it looked as though it would be an okay evening. “And Mary Queen of Scots? Did you talk to her?”
    “No.” She chopped broccoli with a slap. Mary was the head of school, and Jana wanted more control over admissions.
    “You should talk to her.”
    “I did. Your Westonwood experience wasn’t on your resume.”
    I hadn’t meant that. I meant she should talk to her boss about what she wanted out of her job.
    “You must have sent me the old one by accident,” she said.
    Freud would have said it was no accident. He would have said I’d known damn well the one piece of experience Mary wanted to see wasn’t on the resume I told Jana to forward. What did that say about me?
    “I thought you had an updated one, sorry.”
    “I had a thought,” she said, sliding the knife over the cutting board. She glanced at me flirtatiously.
    “Really?” I pushed her hair from her neck. She had a lovely neck.
    “If you went back to St. Paul’s, you could reorganize the discernment committee.”
    “No,” I whispered. I didn’t want a committee of good Episcopalian laypeople to decide my future. That last step needed to be mine and mine alone.
    “If they approve you, you could get ordained. You could have something steady.”
    “That’s not a reason to give your life to God.”
    She set down her knife, and I felt her jaw tighten against my lips.
    “You complain about suffering and God, and then you go to Alondra where there’s nothing but suffering,” she said. “It’s like you’re sticking your face in it out of spite.”
    I pulled away. I wanted to talk about baseball, or the state of the garden, or traffic patterns at rush hour. The last thing I wanted was an exegesis on earthly suffering. “There’s suffering everywhere.” Fiona, my little countertransference case, flashed on the screen in my mind. Her suffering was nothing like mine, and of a different grade than any I’d seen.
    Jana picked up her knife. After tapping it on the cutting board once, as if releasing her negative feelings, she smiled. “Do you want the spicy sauce with the chicken? Or the mustard?”
    “Spicy is fine.” I headed to the bedroom to change out of my work clothes.
    Jana called to me as I walked. “You were late. I was worried.”
    I pretended not to hear her. I didn’t know why I was so grouchy. Traffic. Low blood sugar. Overwhelmed. Late getting home. Jana’s dresser drawer was half open, which made me nuts, and the light in the bathroom was on. Normally those things didn’t bother me, but that evening, as I took my jacket off, I walked a razor’s edge.
    The phone rang. It was Frances’s extension from Westonwood. She had no reason to call me. I’d taken an indefinite sabbatical, and the paperwork was all in order.
    “Dr. Chapman?” she said.
    “Hello, Dr. Ramone.”
    “I’m sorry to bother you.”
    “It’s fine.”
    “Your patient, Fiona Drazen, says she remembers what happened the day she was brought in.”
    I wasn’t supposed to be moved by curiosity or anything else. A therapist was simply a vessel for what the patient found important. Curiosity made the therapist’s desires more important than the patient’s, and that wasn’t acceptable.
    Except damn, I was curious.
    “Really?” I said. “That’s interesting.”
    “She’ll only tell you though.”
    I sighed. I didn’t mean for it to be audible, because though one might assume it was a sigh of resignation, it was a sigh of relief.

CHAPTER 10.
    FIONA
    I  don’t know how long I was in there, but I was peeled off