Margarita Wednesdays: Making a New Life by the Mexican Sea Read Online Free PDF Page A

power to make sure my girls in Kabul would be okay. I was hardly prepared to deal with the accusations to the contrary that were being made, accusations that I now suspect might have been instigated by a certain someone over there who, how shall I say, did not have my best interest at heart. She went there only to make money, some said. She endangered those girls, claimed others. But regardless of how the stone throwing began, it hurt me deeply.
    I was an emotional basket case. Opening a can of beans, taking out the trash, or even getting dressed in the morning would suddenly make me burst into tears. I would be fine one minute, then depressed and lifeless the next.
    One morning, after a particularly rough night, I decided to swallow my pride and go for some advice. And for that, who better than a fellow hairdresser?
    Mike had introduced me to Deena shortly after I arrived in Napa. I figured she already knew a bit about my situation, so I summoned my courage and slowly made my way down Bell Mountain Road to her salon and plopped myself down for a shampoo, diving right into how depressed I had been. “It’s devastating, you know, not being able to go back. I miss my girls, and I worry about them.” She nodded as she wrapped my head in a towel and motioned toward the chair. I continued to blather on and on. In the mirror, I could see her eyes glazing over. “My whole life was there. Do you know how it feels to leave everything, and I mean everything , behind? My clothes, my photos . . . I feel like I even left my soul in Kabul.”
    Deena deftly twisted a hunk of my hair up into a clip. “I don’t get it, Debbie. Why can’t you go back to Cabo?”
    “Cabo? I said Kabul . As in Afghanistan?” So much for myhairdresser theory. Apparently this girl didn’t know Baja from Bagram. So, quickly and efficiently switching gears, I filled her in on my night in Yosemite. As I was paying, she wrote something down on the back of one of her cards and handed it to me. Steve Logan, Therapist.
    I called right away for an appointment, only to learn that Steve Logan, Therapist, was going to cost me $130 an hour.
    “An hour ?” I was barely able to conceal my shock. “That’s over two dollars a minute!” I gasped, quickly doing the math in my head.
    “Uh-huh,” the uninterested receptionist replied. “That’s the fee with the discount for the uninsured. Cash only. You want it or not?” Clearly she was not trained to recognize a woman on the edge.
    “That’s a discount?” I must have been completely out of touch with prices in the States because to me, that sounded like a lot of money. Most families in Afghanistan don’t make that much in a month. For days I kept doing the math, calculating how many people I could have fed back in Kabul, how much rice I could have bought. The hefty price tag didn’t even come with a money-back guarantee if I didn’t manage to salvage my sanity.
    I called my friend Karen back in Michigan, who assured me that I wasn’t being self-indulgent and ordered me to stop being so stupid. “Debbie, you’re not in Afghanistan anymore.”
    To me that seemed to be my biggest problem: I wasn’t in Afghanistan anymore. I didn’t want to be in California. I just wanted to go home. And the only place that felt like home, the first place where I’d ever experienced the feeling that I was living where I was meant to live and doing exactly what I was meant to do, was lethally off-limits. Now I wasn’t sure where home was, and it was slowly killing me. I sat in the house for the next two days, counting the hours until my appointment.
    I EAGERLY PUSHED OPEN THE door to the office to a barrage of tinkling bells and twinkling lights. Dozens of wind chimes and tinymirrors were suspended throughout the reception area. With no magazines in sight, I sat and concentrated on how I was going to tell my story without using up the entire hour. All I was looking for was a little direction and encouragement that,