“Sorry to hear that,” I said, even though I wasn’t. I couldn’t have cared less about this man with his bad haircut and cheap clothes. Besides, my house looked fine. No holes in my walls, no crooked cabinets. I had Henry the handyman on speed dial.
“You were taking care of your parents,” said the little man.
“My father has early-stage Alzheimer’s.”
Mary finally stopped crying long enough to look up. “Me, too! I mean, not me. My husband.”
Darnton lifted a hand, silencing Mary. “And your daughter,” the little man continued.
“My daughter. My business. My husband. My house.”
“Did you ever think that you were . . .”—he hooked his fingers into scare quotes—“ ‘helping’ all those people so you could control them?”
Suddenly I was so tired I could barely speak, and I was craving a pill so badly I could cry. How was I going to live the rest of my life, in a world overrun with idiots like this one, without the promise of any comfort at the end of the day? “I was helping them because they needed help.”
“I’m selfish,” said Aubrey, in a whisper. Her heavily shadowed eyelids were cast down, and she worried a cuticle as she spoke. “I stole from my parents. I stole from my grandma.”
“What about you?” the man asked Mary.
“I don’t think I was,” she said hesitantly. “My drinking didn’t get bad until after my daughter had her babies. She had triplets, because of the in vitro, so I’d drive from Maryland to Long Island once a week, and spend three days with her, and then drive down to New Jersey for the weekends to help my son. He’s single, and he only sees his two on the weekends. That’s why I drank, I think. I’d be so wound up after all that driving, and the kids, that I just couldn’t turn myself off. So I’d have a gin and tonic—that was what my husband and I always drank, gin and tonics—and when that didn’t do it, I’d have two, and then . . .” Tears spilled over the reddened rims of her eyes. “I got a DUI,” she whispered. One hand wandered to the hem of her sweatshirt and tugged at it as she spoke. “I rear-ended someone with my grandbabies in the car. I wasn’t planning on driving, but my son got stuck at work, and I was the only one who could get the kids. I should have said no, made up some reason why I couldn’t drive them, but I was so ashamed. So ashamed,” she repeated, then started to cry again.
Great, I thought. An angry thumb, a drunk granny, and a thief. What was wrong with this picture? The fact that I was in it.
“Excuse me,” I said politely, and walked to the door.
Darnton glared at me. “Orientation’s until ten-fifteen. Then you have Equine.”
“Equine? Yeah, no,” I said. “I need to speak to someone now.” I exited the room. Margo, the woman from the breakfast hour, had been replaced by another young woman in the same outfit. This one had a mustache, faint but discernible. The Big Book was open on her computer keyboard. Underneath it, I could see People magazine—“The Bachelor’s Women Tell All!”
“Oh my God,” I said. “I’m going to miss the Fantasy Suites.”
The woman flashed a quick smile. She wore a pin, instead of a nametag on a lanyard around her neck, which read WANDA. “Yeah, sorry. No TV for you guys, just recovery-related movies.”
“How will I live,” I wondered, “if I don’t know whether he picks Kelly S. or Kelly D.?” As I spoke, I remembered all the episodes I’d watched with Ellie snuggled on the bed beside me, a bowl of popcorn between us, her head on my shoulder as she slipped into sleep. Normal. (Sort of.) Happy. God, what had happened to take me away from that and bring me here?
The woman lowered her voice. “Can you actually tell them apart?”
“One’s a hairdresser, and the other one’s a former NBA dancer,” I said.
“Okay, but they look exactly the same.”
“All the women on that show look exactly the same.” I could talk about this forever and had, in fact, written several well-received blog posts on the homogeneity of The Bachelor’s ladies.
“Tell you what,” said the woman. “I can’t sneak in a DVD. But I’ll tell you who got roses.”
“Deal,” I said, feeling incrementally relieved that not everyone in this place was a monster. Just then, a new Meadowcrest employee cruised into view. Wanda shoved her People magazine out of sight, as the new woman—middle-aged, blonde hair in a bob, tired blue eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses—looked me over.
“Hi there,” I said, sounding professional and polite. “Can you help me find my counselor?”