The Night I Got Lucky Read Online Free PDF Page A

voice.
    I blinked a few times, studying her. Where were the sage comments about the father/daughter Oedipus complex or whatever it was?
    “Right,” I said. “Wel , my mother eventual y realized she had spent more money trying to find him than she’d likely ever get from alimony, so final y she just had to make do. Before he left, we had a great house with white columns. I always thought it looked like a wedding cake. We lived in this little town about an hour and a half northwest of Chicago.”
    Blinda smiled at the image.
    “But she couldn’t afford it anymore, so we moved into an apartment behind the old hospital. My mom had one bedroom and my sisters had another, and they put a cot for me in the half room by the washing machine.”

    Blinda nodded for me to continue. I hadn’t talked about this for so long—maybe never—and now I felt like I couldn’t stop. I told her about how we went from being one of the richest families in town to one of the poorest. I told her about how Dustin and Hadley were taunted at school about our deadbeat dad and how they became tough little girls, always getting into fights, coming home to proudly display black eyes and bloody noses. I explained that my mom got a job working as a receptionist at an auto plant, and that Dustin and Hadley had to get scholarships and put themselves through col ege. I told her about Jan and how it was he who put me through school and who took my mom out of that apartment behind the old hospital, out of that town and into the beautiful house in Barrington where she stil lived.
    Blinda chuckled at that point, although I didn’t think I’d said anything particularly funny. She caught my inquisitive look. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just ironic that your father considered himself such a man’s man, enough to give you girls male names, and then your mother marries someone named Jan—a rather womanly sounding name—and he makes her happy again.”
    I laughed then, too. I think that’s when I knew for certain that Blinda was going to be different from the therapists I’d heard about.

    This was our sixth visit, although I felt in some ways as if I’d been seeing Blinda forever. I knew to hang my sweater on the antique brass rack inside the door. I knew to pour myself a cup of the jasmine-scented tea from the cracked Asian pot on her sideboard. I knew that I could just start talking whenever I wanted, that Blinda was always there with a nod of her blond head or an empathetic cluck of her tongue. I knew the routine, but I didn’t necessarily feel any better for it.
    “It’s not that much to ask for,” I said now.
    “You want your husband to pay attention to you, is that right?” Blinda asked. I had moved from the topic of my father to my other issues—failing marriage, heartbroken mother with no life of her own, inappropriate crush on Evan, inability to get promoted.
    “Wel , yeah,” I said. I shifted around on her wool y red and orange love seat that looked like it was purchased in a Marrakech marketplace. On either end sat bamboo tables with lit yel ow candles and boxes of recycled tissue. Those boxes were always different, replaced, each time I came. It seemed I was Blinda’s only client who didn’t cry constantly. I was the only angry, irritated one. “Yeah, I want Chris to look at me like he used to when we were dating, but I want more than just that,” I said.
    “What else?” She leaned forward, her straight, blond hair swinging. I could not figure out Blinda. She looked like an aging beach bum, someone who would smoke a lot of pot and live in her parents’ basement, and yet hanging on her wal were a plethora of framed diplomas, photos of Hindu Temples and two pictures of her with a robed, bespectacled man who looked very much like the Dalai Lama.
    I sighed. I’d told her al this already. “I want to get the vice presidency. I want my mom to get her own life. I want to get over my dad. And I want Evan to want me.”
    She raised