The line is quiet, then, “Okay. You.”
On Saturday we don’t have a game, and Leah had early workout. Tim is busy at home, so Leah and I make the three-hour drive to Yakima in two and a half. Leah scouts out coffee places where a girl can read for a couple hours while her BGF hangs out with her sister in drug treatment.
“So how is it?” I ask. We’re in the main lounge, me in an overstuffed chair and her across the table on the couch.
“How do you think? It’s drug treatment.”
I am not doing battle. “Relatively speaking, then.”
“Relatively to what? It’s the only drug treatment place I’ve ever been in, if you haven’t noticed.”
I’ve noticed. “Sheila, I don’t know how you want me to ask the question. Are you gonna make it?”
“My counselor says I’m doin’ pretty good.”
“That’s great. How long do you think you’re gonna be here?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Of course I’m going good. I can’t get my hands on anything.”
“The brochure says you get individual and group counseling. Are you making any friends?”
“When have I ever had a friend?”
“Yvonne.”
“Yvonne. I’m still pissed she told you where I was. I would never have texted. . . .”
“Come on. She was trying to help.”
“An’ she’s like a weak little baby anyway. How is someone like Yvonne gonna help me through this? She uses as much as me, an’ hell, I’d rather have me as a mother than her.”
“I wasn’t saying you should hook back up with Yvonne, even though she uses weed, and you use . . . whatever. I was saying if you can make one friend, you have the ability to make another, somebody who’s, like, a little more together.”
Sheila slaps the cushion. “This couch is more together than Yvonne.”
I’m not helping. “So what do you want to talk about?”
“Tell me what’s happening.”
“Aren’t you in touch with your caseworker?”
“No, I’m not in touch with my caseworker, other than she sends notes of ‘support.’ Bitch . . . get a job at Hallmark. Besides, when I wanna know what’s really going on, I’m not askin’ somebody who works for the state.”
“Well,” I say, “Frankie’s still in at Wiz’s place, waiting to see if the Howards are going to get it together as a permanent place.”
“I’m a permanent place. What the hell do they think I’m doing in this shithole?” She says it loud and other patients glance over, then away when they catch Sheila’s threatening look.
“You are a permanent place. But they have to have a fallback position in case you blow out.”
She puts her head down, fiercely massaging the bridge of her nose. I don’t know a whole lot about drug treatment, but Sheila’s got a long way to go. If she got out of here today, she’d be flyin’ by dinnertime.
“What about Ma?” she says.
“What about her?”
“You talk to her about all this? Me?”
“Little bit,” I say. “You know Nancy. She blames it all on social services. When she’s not blaming it on you.”
“Yeah, well, I blame it on her.”
I’m surprised she asked about Nancy at all.
She waits, then, “You think she’d come down here?”
“You mean to go into treatment?”
“No, dummy, to . . . do some sessions with me.”
Wow.
“Somethin’ they look for is resentments,” Sheila says. “I got plenty of those. My counselor says it might be good if Ma came to a couple of sessions. Down the road, I mean.”
I take a deep breath. “She might.”
“Yeah, well, if you wanna make yourself useful, find out.”
“She wants me to drive all the way down there and sit in a room with someone what’s on her side so she can bash me?”
“That’s not how she put it.”
“A course that’s not how she put it. You remember when your therapist roped me into coming in with you?”
“Uh-huh. Right after you brought a Level-three sex offender into our basement. ‘He seems like a nice guy. I’ll keep an eye on him.’” I’m wicked with the imitation.
We’re in the mostly empty bleachers following a Friday night basketball game Nancy saw almost all of. Walter and Leah are about twenty yards away, each waiting to escort one of us home. Pop isn’t here to criticize my play or keep me away from my family “lowlifes” because since he and Momma have been going to therapy, there’s a moratorium on jumping my shit.
“Well,” Nancy says, “I didn’t bring no sex offenders down on your sister.”
“I read the note the therapist gave her to give you. She’s not bringing you there to get bashed. She wants to give Sheila the chance to get her feelings out and you the chance to respond.”
“That’s just a fancy way of sayin’ I get one more chance to hear what a shitty mother I am.”
I take a page from Seth’s book. “Let me ask you a hypothetical question.”
“You mean one that don’t make sense.”
“No. It’s like a what-if question. If you knew that sitting through a few sessions would give Frankie a chance to live with his mother—like help him avoid what we all went through—would you do it?”
“You mean if I knew it would help?”
“Uh-huh.”
She shakes her head as her shoulders slump. “I guess. But I got no way to get there.”
“Leah and I’ll take you. Walter can come, too, if he wants. We’ll go to dinner after.”
“Sounds like some miser’ble double date,” she says.
“Exactly. A miserable double date, only Leah’s boyfriend might take exception to that description.”
I hear intense conversation through the heat-vent walkie-talkie in Marvin’s room—Momma and Pop closed in their bedroom, wrestling over some therapy issue.
“. . . is not on the table, Jack. That girl has had more losses than any three kids should have had to suffer, and I’m not giving her one more.”
“She lies,” Pop says. “And then does whatever she pleases. I can’t have that. What kind of message does that send to Marvin?”
“Jack, have you heard a thing we’ve talked about in therapy? And not that you’ve noticed, but Marvin is totally capable of deciphering all incoming messages. And you may have noticed he’s
