“I’m fine,” I said.
I breathed in through my nose, counting slowly to four; when the attacks kept happening, I’d Googled what to do. I held the air in for the recommended two count. Just this weekend I’d gone booth surfing at an arts fest, and I’d lost my crap when I saw a rack of bright, Kai-style silk wrap skirts billowing in the wind. Not three days later, these crescent-shaped eyes had me freaking out like it was my new hobby.
Being pissed about it wasn’t helping me calm down. I began the slow four-count exhale, one hand pressing my heart as if I was trying to reset it to its regular, calm beating.
The kid fished in the pocket of his over-shiny khaki pants and came out with a mini Hershey bar, the paper wrapper crinkled and its corners blunted by age. He held it out to me. I blinked at it.
“I always carry them. It’s a habit,” he said. “My mom was diabetic.”
“I don’t have diabetes,” I said, snappier than I would have liked. I was thirty-five, and this kid was somewhere in his early twenties. That hardly put me into sickly mother territory. Then I wished I hadn’t said it at all, because what was the follow-up? It’s not diabetes—I’m just having a psychotic episode. I took the candy from his soft, white paw and said, “I skipped lunch.”
It wasn’t the whole truth, but it was true. I unwrapped the Hershey bar and crammed it in my mouth. It was unpleasantly warm from the kid’s pocket.
“Thank you. I’m fine now,” I said, trying not to drool the melting chocolate down my front. My throat was so clamped I could barely get air down it, much less this waxy candy. He nodded, but he didn’t leave. The kid’s accent was light, but he was definitely southern; there was no stopping him from doing chivalry.
According to Google, I was supposed to go lie down someplace quiet, do the breathing thing, and imagine sunrise or a beach. I didn’t have time right now; an A-list client was quitting us. Nick had sent a frantic text a good half hour ago, asking me why the hell I wasn’t in the meeting.
I’d forgotten. I’d gone haring off instead to the DeKalb County Jail, chasing yet another pro bono criminal case. The potential client was female, very young, and guilty mostly of falling in love with a felon. Now she wouldn’t testify against him, and the DA was going to nail her to the wall. I’d been helping girls like this, two a year, ever since I’d passed the bar. Now I’d done five since February, back to back, neglecting my own practice. They were practically the only things I had been doing. There was no way I could take this new case on, but I’d texted the potential client’s name to Birdwine anyway, asking him to dig up info on my own dime.
I’d availed myself of plenty of free therapy back when I was in school at Notre Dame and Emory, so I didn’t need to peruse the stack of old Psychology Todays at my dentist’s office to know why I was doing it. These girls were living incarnations of my mother. Too bad understanding the roots of my compulsion didn’t stop me from having it, or from taking an early lunch hour and driving off to meet with yet another one. I’d forgotten my promise to sit in on Nick’s meeting. I’d parked by the jail, checked my phone, and seen the string of panicked texts he’d sent me while I was in transit.
I’d roared back toward midtown, tearing a hole in Atlanta traffic and almost murdering a tottery pedestrian, yelling at my phone to dial Nick. He’d answered, leaving the client in Catherine’s soothing hands long enough to give me a fraught, unhappy update.
Last quarter had been low, mostly thanks to me, since Nick and Catherine were billing as reliably as ever. This client we were losing was a BANK case. If the BANK walked, this quarter would dip even lower. I didn’t have time for another pro bono, much less a haunting or a breakdown or any other flavor of dead-mother BS.