if he does know my mom's name.
Without missing a beat, the guy leans over to me and whispers into my ear, “Your receipt is that neither you nor your mother are dead. That should be enough.”
Cold sweat runs down my spine, but I let out a sigh of relief.
34
Isabelle
After I gather my thoughts and wander the stacks of the bookstore for a little bit, nursing a cup of tea, I return to work. Technically, I was supposed to be seeing a client at this time, but I redid my schedule so that I could meet with him in the afternoon.
Walking through the bookstore and running my fingers up and down the spines of the books, I slowly start to relax.
It's all over.
The guy made a threat, but we don't owe the debt anymore. My mom is finally free.
I am free.
Fifteen minutes later, I finally feel confident enough to get back to my car and to the office.
We don't have a secretary because we never have walk-ins. Trisha is the boss, but we have our personal information listed in various online resources on speech therapy and clients usually reach out to us individually.
She does some of the marketing and she gets most of the clients. Whatever overflow that she has, she assigns to us.
“Isabelle, can you come over here for a second?” Trisha asks when I walk past her office.
“What's up?” I peek my head in.
“Have a seat.”
She takes her attention away from the computer and spins around in her chair to face me. There's a large glass bowl of suckers that call to me but it doesn't feel like the right moment to grab one.
Trisha hesitates for a moment, so I decide to start the conversation.
“I think everything is going really well,” I say. “Mason is making a lot of progress. Trent is currently working on blowing bubbles. Last week he couldn’t do it at all, but then he kept working and working at it and his mom sent me this video.” I pull out my phone to show her.
“That's great,” she says, shaking her head. “That's not what I really want to talk about right now.”
I put my phone down and get an eerie feeling about what is about to happen.
“I don't think we are a good fit anymore, Isabelle,” Trisha says.
“What are you talking about?”
“You're a very good therapist, but you're not very good at marketing and finding new clients. I was letting that slip for a while, but it's just not going to work out anymore.”
My head starts to buzz and it becomes hard to hear her speaking.
“Is this about what happened with my trip? I told you. It's never going to happen again.”
“No, it's not about that. I understand. This is just something that I've been thinking about for a while. I've just done an evaluation of everyone working here and you are the one who has brought in the least amount of clients. As you know, we teach kids to speak. They get older, they get better, they learn. We all want that of course. Then they stop coming to us. That's why we have to keep finding new clients all the time. Last year, we made a goal to expand from this building to something bigger and have more therapists here, but again, that's not something that can happen if I don't have everyone pulling their weight.”
I want to say something else in protest, but I know that it's all in vain.
Maybe she's right.
Perhaps it's true what she’s saying. It just doesn't feel like that. This feels a lot more like it's personal, like she’s still not over me taking off.
“What if I were to take a pay cut? Have fewer hours? Anything while I find another job.”
“One more week is all I can do,” Trisha says.
I start to say something in response, but she just shakes her head and refuses to listen.
The door dings outside and I know that it's one of her clients. She looks at me and then looks at the door, silently ushering me out.
I walk down the hallway to the back office that I share with the others and collapse onto one of the chairs.
What the hell am I going to do now? I just took out an insane credit card balance. I owe over a hundred thousand dollars in student loans as well as a mortgage.
All of my savings are depleted and now I don't even have a job.
35
Tyler
ONE YEAR LATER
It rains in Seattle nine months out of