Drug court sends everybody to Meridian because Meridian has the contract. White noise machine on the floor outside the door. Bowl of butterscotch on the end table with the wrappers fused together. Dale sits with the door behind him and writes on a legal pad while I talk, and he keeps writing after I stop.
I am bad at this. Third Tuesday in a row of the same worksheet and I make a face. I say the group is a joke. I ask why I test on Sunday when the lab closes Sunday. He writes that down too, and I watch him do it, and I say something else so he will have to keep up.
Thursday morning the team meets without me and then they call me in. The judge reads off a page in front of him, and partway down it he says antisocial personality disorder, and then he says the word incarceration, and then he asks if I have anything to add.
I have plenty. I keep it.
The sanction is a written assignment on honesty, due Monday, one page. I do it at the kitchen table on lined paper and I turn it in on time and I am good at it, and the next week I am mouthy again about the Sunday testing, and that goes in the file underneath the diagnosis, where it looks like proof.
Meridian is still out on the boulevard past the tire place. Same sign.
At the Chapel Ranch, Rhonda gives me her login on a sticky note and I put it under the keyboard where anybody could find it, and I sit at her desk after five and type up sessions I was not in. Diffuser going. Framed thing about grace over the filing cabinet. She stands behind me sometimes and says the words and I put them in.
I type them. Fifty, sixty of them, all winter.
In March we are coming back from a placement meeting and something I say gets her going past the truck stop, and by Third she has both hands off the wheel and her face is turned all the way toward mine while the road does whatever the road is doing. I get the handle at Third and Grand and I go out of the car onto the sidewalk with my palms first. She does not stop. I sit up. I get to the alley behind the flower shop before I call anybody, because I want a building between us when the phone rings.
I tell the Chapel Ranch on Monday and they are done with her by Friday, which is fast, and nobody touches the notes, which would have cost money. They are still in there. Her credential on the top, my sentences underneath.
She has her own place three hours south now. Still Waters Counseling. Green pastures on the letterhead, the whole psalm running along the bottom in script.
Kayla is Shelby’s client and my coworker, so I get all of it in the break room and none of it from either of them.
The threat is that she will do it if Shelby does not marry her. I hear this over the microwave with my hand on the door.
The wedding photos go up in August. Shelby lets the license go instead of renewing.
Two years later I type Shelby’s name into the board’s licensee lookup, all lowercase, then again with the capital, then with the maiden name, and the page comes back with nothing to display. No order. No consent agreement. No docket number. The search field goes empty again and waits for me to try something else.
Kayla is with the state now, up high, in child welfare. She signs off on which files get opened on other people’s children.
Marlene goes under around minute eleven. Chin comes down, small correction, chin comes down and stays.
I keep talking. I start putting a lift on the ends of my sentences so she has something to come up on. I pick subjects loud enough to do the work. Fifty-some hours of that over the year, and a claim going out every week saying the two of us were doing something else.
At two in the morning I sit on the bathroom floor and read the code on my phone. There is a section on impairment. It names sleep deprivation. It says reduce the caseload, take leave, stop practicing for a while. I read it twice and put the phone face down on the tile.
I rehearse it in the lot, twice, soft enough that nobody could take it wrong.
She screams. There is a childhood in the volume, and the words are whatever was closest, and I go where I have always gone with that sound, which is very still and a long way back behind my own face.
Two weeks later the mailman comes up the walk with a clipboard instead of putting anything in the box. Shorts in October. He hands me the pen and turns the clipboard so the green card is facing me and waits with his hand out for the pen back, and there is a dog going off two houses down the whole time.
Reason for termination: dissatisfaction with billing.
The statement is in with it. Ten thousand and change, to a woman on Medicaid, which means the year of naps went out under a code.
I call about referrals because I have to. She says that as a provider I should know how to find another counselor.
Then a letter says the balance is dismissed.
Then in November the bill comes again. Same figure, same account number, new date at the top.
So I call her.
That is the last time we speak. Not the sleeping, not the screaming, not the thing I rehearsed in the lot. Me at my own counter with the statement flattened out in front of me, reading her the account number off her own paperwork, saying it slow so she can find it, and her saying she will look into it.
The list comes off Psychology Today, eleven names inside sixty miles. Four ring to a fax tone or a disconnect. Three take a message. Two are not taking anyone. One has an opening in Casper in March, which is four months and a hundred and forty miles. The state is twenty-nine areas short and needs forty-one more people to clear it, and I am working down eleven of them with a pen in my teeth.
The one who calls back has a fish tank in the waiting room and a magazine from 2019.
She is the one who says complaint out loud, in a room, to my face, the way a person says a word that is allowed.
The form is on the counter now, next to the sugar. Name of licensee. License number. Date of occurrence. Nature of the allegation. Supporting documentation. What outcome are you seeking.
I fill in every field.
the misfit west 