Missing Pieces Read Online Free PDF Page B

in one corner that I sometimes use to record sessions—always with the client’s permission. A clock is on the wall behind my head, as well as several Impressionist prints: Monet’s incandescent water lilies; a peaceful Pissarro village; an apple-cheeked Renoir girl standing on a swing.
    There’s another room at the back where I keep my desk, my phone, my files, a small fridge, some stacking chairs, and a treadmill, or “dreadmill,” as I’ve come to refer to it. The treadmill has always struck me as a perfect symbol of the times: people walking as fast as they can, going nowhere. Even so, I try to spend at least twenty minutes a day on this awful contraption. It’s supposed to relax my mind while toning my body. In fact, it only irritates me. But then, everything irritates me these days. I blame it on my hormones, which are in a state of constant flux, the magazines all tell me. These articles irritate me as well. It doesn’t help that “women of a certain age,” as I believe the French call us, are always being pictured in the accompanying illustrations as dried-up bare branches on a once-flowering tree.
    Anyway, it was Monday, I’d been seeing clients all morning, and my stomach was growling its way through my last session before lunch. The couple sitting across from me had come for help in dealing with their teenageson, who was as sullen and difficult a fourteen-year-old as I’d ever encountered. After two sessions, he’d refused to come back, although his parents persisted, gamely trying to find some sort of compromise that everyone could live with. Of course, compromise only works if all those involved are committed to it, and their son was committed only to wreaking havoc.
    “He snuck out again after we’d gone to bed,” Mrs. Mallory was saying, her husband sitting stiffly beside her. “We wouldn’t even have known he was gone except that I woke up to go to the bathroom and I saw a light on. I went into his room, and you wouldn’t believe it, he’d stuffed his bed with pillows to make it look like he was still in it, like they do in those prison movies you see on TV. He didn’t get home until almost three in the morning.”
    “Where did he go?” I asked.
    “He wouldn’t say.”
    “What happened then?”
    “We told him how worried we’d been …”
    “She
was worried,” her husband corrected tersely.
    “You weren’t?” I asked.
    Jerry Mallory shook his balding head. He was a neat man who always wore a dark blue suit and a gold-striped tie, in contrast to his wife, who usually looked as if she’d thrown on the first thing that tumbled out of the dryer. “The only thing I worry about is the police showing up on our doorstep.”
    “I don’t know what to do anymore.” Jill Mallory looked from me to her husband, who stared resolutely ahead. “He’s making me a nervous wreck. I don’t sleep; I yell at everyone. I yelled at little Jenny again this morning. Although I explained to her that even though I yell at her a lot lately, it doesn’t mean I don’t love her.”
    “You also gave yourself permission to keep yelling ather,” I told her, as gently as I could. She looked at me as if she’d been shot through the heart with an arrow.
    Jill, Jerry, Jenny, Jason, I recited in my mind, wondering whether the succession of J’s had been deliberate. Jo Lynn, I found myself adding, picturing her in a crowded West Palm Beach courtroom, praying that common sense had kept her at home.
    “Is there some way to force Jason back into counseling?” his mother asked. “Maybe a psychiatrist …”
    I told her that wouldn’t be a good idea. Teenagers are not great candidates for therapy, for two main reasons: one, they have no insight into why they do things, and two, they have no curiosity about why they do things.
    When the hour was over and the Mallorys had gone, I went into the other room, grabbed a tuna fish sandwich from the small fridge, and checked my voice mail. There were two hang-ups