by Phoebe Fox
“Well, if you’re sure.” But she still looked doubtful. “Be careful, though, okay? There’s something about that guy...I just don’t trust him.”
I wondered where these cautious instincts had been when she was dating every bad boy within a hundred-mile radius, but the only reason I opened my mouth was to put my straw into it and take a long sip of my daiquiri.
“Don’t worry,” I said after I swallowed. “I’m always very cautious.”
Sudden pain knifed through my brain as my entire cerebellum cramped, and I groaned and grabbed my head.
“Brain freeze?” Sasha asked conversationally.
“Aggghhh,” I moaned, managing only a nod.
“Reassuring. Way to be cautious.”
She leaned forward and plucked my drink from my limp hand.
Chip and I met at a diner on Estero Boulevard late Monday afternoon.
“I want to start with Katie,” he said, stirring a cup of coffee.
I took a sip of my own coffee. “Okay. Tell me about Katie.”
Katie was the Big One—the one who’d broken Chip’s heart the worst. They’d met at his bar and fallen “wildly in love,” he said. He moved into her place within the week, and it was the most intense, best relationship he’d ever had.
And the worst.
“We fought. Like, not all the time, but a lot.”
I nodded. “What did you fight about?”
“Stupid shi—stuff. I didn’t answer all of her calls. I didn’t seem interested enough in her stories. I was hanging out too much with the guys.”
“Sounds like she wanted more of your attention than she was getting?” I asked.
“Yeah, I guess. It seemed like she was always on my case about it, though, you know?”
“Is that why you broke up?”
He made an odd little gesture—a twitch of his shoulder that was meant to be a shrug, I thought, but just looked like a tic. “Yeah. No. Kinda.”
“What do you mean?”
The server came back to our table to refill our mugs, and Chip raised one slanted eyebrow at me. “Hey, you want to order some chow? They’ve got great grits here.”
“No, that’s okay. You go ahead if you want to, though.”
He shot that incandescent smile of his at the tired-looking woman in a worn apron. “Ma’am, do you mind bringing us a plate of your cheese grits? And two forks?”
She perked right up, lifting one spotty, lined hand to smooth the ashy blond hair at her temples. “Sure thing, honey. What else can I do for you?”
“You’re already doing just right. Thank you.” He kept the grin on her till she turned away, and I saw a pink flush creeping into her cheeks.
Amused, I looked back at Chip, who was adding creamer to his coffee. The woman had to be pushing sixty, and he’d just effortlessly reduced her to a blushing schoolgirl.
At least I wasn’t the only one susceptible to his charms.
Chip was telling me something about this restaurant, and how he used to come in here for breakfast after his closing shift at the bar nearly every night. I focused back on him and waited until he took a breath.
“We were talking about Katie,” I reminded him. This was an odd circumstance—not quite therapist/client, not quite friends—and I wanted to keep things out of the social realm. “And why you broke up.”
He looked down at his cup. “Oh. Right. Look, Doc, I don’t want you to think badly of me.”
“Chip, I’m not here to judge you or your actions. You asked for my help. I can’t really offer it unless you give me the full story.”
He leaned onto the table on folded arms and blew out a long breath that smelled of coffee and cigarettes and faintly of cinnamon, but strangely it wasn’t unpleasant. “Okay. Crap. Maybe I should have started with Amelia. She dumped me cold and I didn’t do anything wrong to her.”
“We can start with Amelia, if you prefer.”
“No. No. Okay.” Another sigh, and he scrubbed his cheeks with his hands, making a rasping sound against the stubble. “I messed around on Katie.”
Well, that was about what I’d expected. It was funny that Chip—who’d once had a penchant for punching people in the face—was this embarrassed about cheating on someone.
I kept a neutral expression. “Okay. Is that why you broke up?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Eventually.”
“You mean she didn’t find out right away?”
He pushed back from the table and slouched in the red booth. “Oh, no. She found out. I was late coming home and she drove to the bar and caught us in the beer cooler.”
“Ah.”
“I screwed up—I knew it. I didn’t even like the girl. She was just there, and Katie’d been mad at me for some stupid thing, and...you know how it goes.”
Once upon a time I’d have said I didn’t. But considering that, when I was having relationship woes of my own, I’d almost done something identical with the very man telling me this story, I no longer rode my old high horse. I nodded. “I do know how it is to do something out of anger or hurt that you later wish you hadn’t done.”
Chip looked up from mutilating an empty packet of sugar. “Thanks, Doc. It helps that you understand.”
There it was again—that genuineness I never saw in Chip until recently. This new version of him could be disarmingly sincere.
The server showed back up tableside at that moment, setting the grits in front of Chip with a smile curving her newly lipsticked mouth. “Here you go—cheese grits.” She turned her head as if to address me as she set a roll of silverware in front of each of us, but her eyes stayed on Chip. “Extra fork.”
Chip sat up straight. “All right! These are worth getting out of bed for.”
“What else can I get for you, honey?”
“This is perfect, just like the service. Thank you.” He winked at the woman, and she visibly preened.
“It’s my pleasure.” She gave a wink back before turning and walking back toward the kitchen with a spring in her step that hadn’t been there before. I felt a strange tenderness ooze into me like smoke. I’d thought flirting for Chip was an autonomic response, like breathing, but here he was trying to make a worn-down woman with a thankless job feel good.
He unrolled his silverware and dug a fork in. “Get on in here, Doc—you won’t be sorry.”
I smiled at him, making no move toward my utensils. “You just made her day, you know.”
Chip looked up at me, chewing his first mouthful, a question in his ocean-colored eyes.
“The server,” I explained. “You made her feel really good.”
He swallowed and flashed that same luminous smile at me, and something jolted alarmingly inside.
“Oh, I don’t know about that. Come on, Doc—try these.”
As I reached over with a fork and scraped the barest taste from one edge of the grits, I warned myself to never let my guard down with Chip Santana.
eight
After Chip polished off the plate of grits, I got the rest of the Katie story.
He’d been candycoating.
Katie was more than pissed. When Chip got home, everything he owned was lying on her front lawn—not in suitcases, but spread out like mulch—and Katie was waiting in the kitchen.
With a gun.
Which she shot at him.
I was glad at that point that I hadn’t laid into the cheese grits, because it wouldn’t have been a pretty picture with my mouth hanging nearly down to the tabletop. “Are you shitting me?” I cleared my throat, mentally hunting down Wise Therapist, who was nowhere to be found. “Sorry.”
Chip waved a hand and lifted one side of his mouth in a sardonic grin. “Nah. Nice to see the armor get dropped.”
I didn’t have time
to chew on that, though, because Chip was going on with the story: “I tried to grab the gun away from her, but I slipped in the blood, and—”
“The blood?!”
He raised an eyebrow. “Well, yeah, Doc—she shot me.”
I had no answer to that—no words at all, actually.
“In the calf—I mean, she wasn’t totally nuts—and believe me, if she’d wanted to hit an artery, she’d have done it, even from across the house. Katie could shoot.” He actually looked fond for a moment. “Anyway, I guess she thought I was lunging for her when I slipped, and she reared back and belted me in the side of the head with the barrel, and that’s when I got pissed—sorry, mad.”
“That’s when you got pissed?”
He went on as if I hadn’t interrupted. “I didn’t mean...well, I guess I didn’t really know what I was doing, and I just grabbed her by the ankles and yanked her down—the floor was pretty slippery at that point—”
I cringed.
“—and then I...Aw, shit.” He didn’t even correct his language this time—just pushed the empty plate away from him and propped his elbows on the table, dropping his head into his upraised hands.
We sat like that for a moment or two. I caught from the corner of my eye our server sending me a hot glare, as if I were responsible for Chip’s upset. I averted my gaze from her and broke the silence, afraid he’d just sit like that forever if I didn’t.
“And then what happened? Chip?” He looked up, his eyes bloodshot, and suddenly I was afraid of the answer.
He wanted me to help him make amends to her, I reminded myself. At least I knew he hadn’t killed her.
Probably.
“What happened next?” I asked quietly.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
Oh, shit.
“I...I tried to strangle her.” His voice was choked, as if he himself were strangling, and my stomach dropped to the floor. “And then...and then we were...having sex”—a whisper—“both of us going at each other like crazy right there, on the kitchen floor. And then afterward I just...”
I felt ill.
“I just left her there. I never saw her again.”
The whole story was so much worse than I’d first imagined...but on the other hand, not as bad as I’d begun to fear.
Glass half-full, I suppose.
I didn’t even know what to say after Chip’s last verbal bomb. In my old practice I’d dealt with depression and narcissism and even mild schizophrenia, but this was so far out of my depth I couldn’t even come up with something as textbook as, “So how did that make you feel?”
Besides, it was pretty obvious how Chip felt. The guy who usually had one emotional setting—rage—was sitting across from me looking destroyed.
I let out air I hadn’t realized I was holding in, and the breath quavered. “Chip.” I shook my head. “That’s awful.”
The words were out before I could censor them, and I knew they were all wrong—you didn’t judge; you didn’t make someone in pain feel worse.
But he nodded eagerly as if I’d offered at least some slim solace. “I know.”
“Why did you do that?”
“’Cause I was pissed. I was shot. I loved her.” His voice was ragged. “I don’t know. It was so...bad, like you said. I gotta start there, right? If I can’t make this right, then there’s no point to any of it, is there?” His eyes were searching mine almost desperately, and he was pulling at his goatee with his fingers so hard I worried he’d rip it off.
I reached across and grasped the hand yanking at himself, pulled it down to the tabletop and kept mine resting firmly over it. “Don’t do that, Chip.”
He turned his hand over and clutched my fingers so tightly I nearly cried out. But I just squeezed back instead, and we sat in silence.
“I can’t fix this, can I? It’s too bad.” He looked beaten.
“Well...” I thought for a moment. “What do you mean by ‘fix’? What do you want to come of this?”
“I want her to forgive me,” he said without hesitation. “The only way I can live with this forever is if she says it’s okay.”
I tried to soften my words.
“I don’t know if that’s possible, Chip. That’s up to Katie, not you.”
A thwacking sound on the table made us both jump, and I didn’t realize until I saw our server standing there like a Valkyrie that our fingers were still linked. I jerked my hand back guiltily, pulling toward me the plastic check tray she’d slapped down.
“You pay at the front,” she snapped, and then stalked away.
I focused back on Chip, who was slumped in the booth, staring at his lap. “Then there’s no point to any of this,” he said so quietly I almost didn’t hear him.
“There is.” I leaned forward. “This isn’t about her forgiving you, Chip. It’s about you asking for it. Taking responsibility for what you did, and showing your true remorse over it.”
He looked up at me as if I were crazy. “What does that accomplish? It doesn’t erase anything.”
“Erase it? You can’t do that anyway. Even if she forgives you. It happened, Chip. You did it. You have to own up to that.”
“I did! I just told it to you!”
“Yes. And that’s a good start. But you told me you want to make amends, didn’t you?” He nodded, more a jerk of his head. “Okay. Then you have to do it with her—with Katie,” I said. “Without any expectation in return. She may accept it—she may forgive you. But she may not. All you can do is try.”
He looked forlorn. “She’s never going to take my call.”
“Then go see her.”
“She won’t see me, either.”
“Then write her.”
His satyr’s brows came together for a moment, and then his forehead cleared. “Yeah! Okay! I like that. Like a text—‘I’m sorry’?”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or shake him.
“I don’t think a two-word text is going to do it.” I spent a little time explaining how to formulate an apology letter, keeping it strictly to general guidelines: I wanted Chip to come up with the actual words.
“Okay, I’ll give it a shot,” he said doubtfully as we rose and moved toward the register. “But will you take a look at it before I send it?”
“I’d be glad to,” I said. Reaching into my purse for my wallet, I felt a warm hand on my elbow.
“Let me get this, Doc.”
“That’s okay, I asked you to meet here. It’s a business expense.”
He frowned. “Oh, well...okay. Thanks. Um, I guess...what do I owe you for the consultation?”
I shook my head, having prepared for this conversation. “This is a bit odd, I know, but I don’t think resuming our counseling relationship is a good idea, considering...well, we stepped over some boundaries in the past,” I finished lightly, my face on fire.
Chip didn’t say anything, his eyes glued on me.
“But that’s behind us, and I do want to help you,” I went on. “I’m happy to meet now and then if you need further help with this, just as...well, not a friend, exactly.” I smiled to soften the words. “More like a mentor, of sorts, if you need a little extra help with this. Sound good?”
He was still fixing me with that intense stare, but slowly his expression cleared. “Okay, Doc. Whatever you say. I’m grateful for whatever help you can offer—really. If I need to pay you just let me know, okay?” He gave that slow boyish grin that always did disturbing things inside me. But this time all that struck me was how straight and white his teeth were.
A knot I hadn’t even known was in my stomach loosened. This might be a good idea for me too. Maybe meeting Chip in this safe middle ground between professional and personal was a way to remove that inexplicable draw I’d always felt t
o him. If he had a lot more stories like the one he’d just told me, I suspected it wouldn’t take any time at all before I was finally completely immune to Chip Santana.
nine
Mary Lynn Moretti had given her husband an ultimatum: He either cleaned up his act and quit cheating, or he had to pack his bags and get out, and he could kiss goodbye any hope of winning custody of their three children.
Antonio Moretti, unsurprisingly, was the first one to share in the group meeting that Saturday.
Antonio couldn’t imagine life without his kids—or Mary Lynn, whom he loved “more than life itself,” he told us. So he agreed, and swore that his womanizing was behind him.
That very same night he’d wound up in a bathroom stall at the Drink Tank in North Fort Myers with a woman whose face he couldn’t remember even as he drilled her from behind.
Antonio wasn’t usually the type of client I worked with. I was more likely to be consulted by the wife in a situation like this one, or one of the many girlfriends wondering why “her” man couldn’t commit to her, or why she kept going back knowing that he never would. It was a new experience for me to be on this end of things: counseling the person I’d usually be counseling his partners to run far away from.
But it had been hard to turn Antonio away, from the earnest email he’d sent me. In person I could see he was as sincere as he’d sounded—his eyes were dark and haunted, despite his easy smile and outgoing personality, and I heard self-loathing in every word that I doubted even he knew was there. He’d started today by asking all of us to help him figure out why he had such trouble with fidelity, and how to do something about it.
So far I was wondering what we’d taken on. In the past three weeks alone, he told us, he’d been with four different women, and the lengths he went to so he could conceal his transgressions from his wife boggled my mind. One was at a gas station on his lunch hour, when he went in after a fill-up to get a beef jerky and instead got jerked off in the restroom by the attendant who was in there cleaning it. One was a woman who worked in his building on a different floor—they went up to the smoking area on the roof midmorning and she gave him a blowie behind a shrubbery. The other two were similar stories—women he met entirely casually who almost immediately offered him sexual favors in inappropriate places at the unlikeliest of times.