Warm Hearts Read Free Page B

have had him in the wings.
    The ice cube she’d held was nothing more than lingering streaks of wetness on her neck, forehead and cheeks. Taking the glass of tea from the counter, she settled on the window seat with her shoulder and head braced against the wooden jamb. She tried to concentrate on the small stirrings of air, but there were few. The night was a thick blanket of heat. Little moved or breathed.
    Unable to draw her mind into a total blank, she found herself thinking of life’s little complications. There was her work, for one thing. On the plus side was her love of it. She was in partnership with three other therapists; their offices were in newly renovated and comfortable quarters within walking distance of her apartment. When she’d first joined the practice, she’d assumed that her work would consist of references from her partners, who’d already established themselves in the area. And indeed, that was how she’d started. But one client had led to another, and to a consulting position at a local prep school, and to leadership of a group session, and to more clients. Her practice was full, evenly split between children and adults. She found it incredibly rewarding.
    There were days like today, though, when things just hadn’t worked. Her eight-o’clock appointment, a troubled high-school junior, had stood her up. Her eleven-o’clock appointment, a woman struggling to make her marriage work, had spent the hour evading issues of dependency by asking how Caroline could possibly understand what she was going through if she’d never been married herself. Her three-o’clock appointment, a ten-year-old girl, refused to talk. And her four-o’clock appointment, a divorced pair whose two children she was also counseling, skirted every pertinent issue by accusing her of a conflict of interest in working with the whole family. It didn’t matter that they’d been the ones to initially request it; when the therapist herself became a negative factor in the proceedings, the prognosis was poor. Though Caroline had promptly referred the parents to one of her partners, she’d been saddened by the loss of therapy time and effort.
    After swirling the ice cubes around in her glass, she took several sips of tea. The drink soothed her throat but did little to cool her thoughts. Frustration at work was part of the job. Even on the best of days, the intense concentration she gave her patients was draining. Still, when four setbacks occurred in an eight-hour span, she was discouraged.
    A trickle of sweat crept into the hollow between her breasts. She dabbed at it lightly with her shift, then, prying the undersides of her thighs from the seat, drew up her knees into a more comfortable pose.
    It was the responsibility that was so awesome, she decided. Clients came to her with issues of mental health. When she let them down, she felt let down herself. Which was pretty much why, she mused as she cast a glance at the telephone, she felt guilty about the answering machine. She had a responsibility toward her family, too.
    Wishing she could be a little more selfish, she set down her tea, went to turn off the machine, then returned to her perch. How could she say no when they wanted to talk? She might not be the alarmist her mother was, but if her mother felt in a panic, then the panic was real. Likewise, she could remind her sister that no one had forced her to juggle a marriage, a law career, and a pregnancy, but still she was proud of Karen and had encouraged her from the start. And as for her brother, Carl, her sadness over his pending divorce was made all the worse by her fondness for his wife, Diane, and the knowledge that she’d been the one to originally bring the two together.
    Little complications? She supposed. But they weighed her down. From the time she’d reached her teens, she’d been the Dear Abby of the family. Just as she couldn’t heal her father’s