The Story Hour Read Online Free PDF Page A

the temple giving me a blessing. “Okay,” I say.
    â€œYou promise?”
    â€œPromise,” I say, but I don’t know what I promising. My heart feel soft, like it do when I was a young child and still had a mother.
    â€œGood,” she say, and then, like broken promise, she gone out of the room.

4
    T HE SHAKING STARTED as soon as Maggie exited the room and stood in the hallway writing notes in the medical chart. She steadied her hand on the edge of the binder as she wrote, stopping to smile at the two nurses who walked past. “Patient responsive,” she wrote. “Eager to talk. Command of English and language comprehension passable. Need SEVA to do a home evaluation.” SEVA was the regional social service group that helped Asian immigrants who were victims of domestic abuse. She had sat on its board when the group formed seven years ago.
    She wrote for several long minutes and then flipped back a couple of pages to reread the psychiatrist’s notes. Unlike many of the psych patients here, Lakshmi had not seemed fuzzy-headed. Maggie was relieved to find that Tom had not gone heavy on medicating her.
    She was aware that she was still shaking as she took the elevator down to her office and was thankful that she was alone. It was a silly problem, this, but there it was. She had mentioned it to her therapist, Sophie Anderson, when it first started five years ago, but Sophie had shrugged it off. You can’t be in this line of work, and be engulfed by human misery, and not develop a tic or two, Sophie had said.
    Maggie had escaped it longer than most of her colleagues. For years, she’d been capable of detaching herself from her patients’ problems, was able to enjoy her life with Sudhir—the home they’d built, the garden they’d planted together, the vacations they took, the friends from grad school whom they still visited, the visits by Sudhir’s siblings and cousins from India. She’d had no trouble reminding herself that this was her true life. She’d come home from the hospital, take a shower, and let the running water wash away the tales of incest, domestic abuse, parental neglect, or child abuse; would compartmentalize the suicide attempts, the PTSD, the schizophrenia, the autistic younger brother, the borderline mother, the cigarette burns, the beatings with rubber hoses, the date rapes, the hoarse whisperings in the dark, the muttered threats to never tell or else, the guilt at having killed civilians at point-blank range. She prided herself on her ability to maintain the wall of separation between home and hospital.
    Her confidence in her ability to keep her boundaries intact was so great that five years ago she’d convinced Sudhir to add a back porch to their house, where she could see clients in her private practice. It would be cheaper than the office space she’d rented all these years, she’d argued, and ultimately, the goal was to quit the hospital job and focus on her practice. The Cedarville winters were cold and brutal; it would be nice not to have to travel to the office after a day at the hospital.
    And so, for her birthday, Sudhir had hired the brother of one of his colleagues to build the extension. They’d gone to Rome for two of the four weeks it took for the structure to be built.
    Two days before she was to see her first client at the new office, her phone had rung. It was her day off, and she had just stepped out of the shower. She ran to pick up the phone, sure it was Sudhir calling to say he’d forgotten something at home and could she drop it off. “Hey,” she said.
    But it wasn’t Sudhir. It was her father. She knew from the way he wheezed into the phone a fraction of a second before he said, “Baby girl? It’s me, Wallace.”
    When had he taken to calling himself that instead of Dad? She knew she’d sometimes called him that during her angry college years, had said it deliberately,