complain about it most days. Almost every day, in fact, in recent months.”
“Because I hate it,” Martha told her. “But I need a job. I don’t have a choice.”
“It sounds to me like you do have a choice. You’re making the choice to be there. So, if you’re complaining about something, then make another choice.”
“It’s not that easy.”
Dr. Baer kept pushing. She kept asking her questions about the job, asking her why she hated it, telling her that it sounded like she was avoiding things. It was really rude, when you got right down to it. That was the only way to describe it.
At the end of the session, Martha had cried a little bit. She was tired of defending her job and then trying at the same time to explain why it was so awful. Because she did hate it, she did. But she couldn’t hate it completely, and she knew that too. J.Crew had saved her, and maybe that was pathetic but it was true. When it had felt like she was never going to be able to be productive again, when the world seemed really awful, she was able to go there and fold clothes.
It hadn’t always been easy, but she’d been able to get up and go, at first just for a few hours at a time, and when she got home, she’d go right back to bed. But at least she felt like she’d done something. And as time went on, it got easier, and then she didn’t have to convince herself to get up and go to the store. She just did it, and now it was almost effortless. But always, in the back of her mind, was the thought that she might slip back to that place, to that time when getting out of bed seemed almost impossible.
Was she fixed now? Was that what Dr. Baer was trying to tell her? It couldn’t be. No one in her life would ever consider her “cured.” At least once a day someone told her to lighten up. Every time she talked to her sister, Claire said, “Calm down. Stop worrying.”
But she couldn’t. That was the thing. Martha would have loved to stop worrying, but she didn’t know how. Maybe Claire thought it was crazy, the way Martha always thought there was a murderer around every corner, or that she had stomach cancer, or that she was going to die in a car crash. But the thing was, those things happened. They happened every day to lots of people. And so she couldn’t understand how other people just walked through life, unconcerned, not even considering the possibility that tragedy could strike at any moment.
How did these people just assume that they were going to live a full and safe life, when all evidence pointed the other way? When there were so many ways for people to die, so many different ways that people could get hurt—just walking down the street, or even sitting at their desks at work—wasn’t it a miracle that anyone made it through the day at all?
As the session was ending, Martha had stood up and looked straight at Dr. Baer, to make one more attempt to try to get her to understand. And now, the last thing she’d said was playing over and over again in her head: “I can’t fold another pair of pants with whales on them,” she’d said. “I’ll die if I do.”
CHAPTER 3
In the Coffey house, there was always a list taped to the refrigerator. At the top, it was titled: THINGS WE NEED. When the list got too full, or most of the items had been crossed off, someone would tear it down and start a new list with the same heading. The title was always capped and underlined, as if to stress that yes, this is important, these aren’t just things we want, these are things we need.
Weezy couldn’t even remember when the list had started. She supposed it was when she and Will first moved into the house, over thirty years ago. They were so young then, barely out of college, and at that time they needed everything. But times were different, and they didn’t ask their parents for help or just charge everything, like kids would today. Neither of them even had a credit card yet, and they had a whole house to fill. So they made a list to prioritize what they were going to buy first. Weezy remembered their deciding to buy