Read Online Bebe Moore Campbell by 72 Hour Hold - Free Book Online Page B

flipped it back and forth furiously. She was tall and a bit overweight, with frizzy hair that was growing out of the blond dye job that someone had administered too many appointments ago. Her hazel eyes were partially hidden by drooping eyelids above and dark circles below. Whatever age she was, she looked older.
    “Bethany,” I said. “How have you been?”
    She nodded, a clipped, jerky gesture that underscored the tension that was tightening the muscles in her face, the cords in her neck. In the world of the Serenity Prayer, tranquillity was definitely not her goal. Bethany was the rabble-rouser of the group. At every meeting she railed against insurance companies and psychiatrists, medications and rules. She waved her cigarette and ignored my question.
    “That Dr. Gold is full of shit. This fucking group is full of shit.”
    She didn’t lower her voice. Bethany wasn’t looking for a response, just an opening. My head tilted slightly. From that angle, her rage was palpable, bristling on her face like a skunk’s raised tail.
    Wham!
The heel of her hand hit the back of my folding chair. “This is such a sick joke. He’s talking about nutritional supplements, the latest this, the latest that, the marvelous advances. How the hell do we get them to take anything? Tell me that. Dammit, we’re all here because the people we love won’t take their meds. That’s why their lives are a mess, and that’s why our lives are a mess. If the expert isn’t going to address that one salient issue, he might as well stay away from the party.”
    The chair’s last vibration subsided just as Bethany’s rant ended. I half expected some angry church administrator to burst into the room and demand that we settle down, which would have been futile. What was inside Bethany couldn’t be called to order. I knew from previous meetings that her daughter was a wild marauding schizoaffective—a mixture of psychosis and mood disorder, not necessarily at the same time—zooming full throttle toward the abyss. The emotions registering in Bethany’s tired eyes and pressed lips vacillated between outrage and hysteria. I knew how bad it could get, and it was clear that Bethany was living in that deep gully. There wasn’t a rope long enough to pull her out. I reached up and squeezed her hand.
    “It is what it is,” she said grimly. “How’s your daughter?”
    I didn’t want to tell her, didn’t want to make her feel worse than she already did. “She’s doing okay,” I said.
    “You’re so lucky. Angelica is still . . . way, way, way out there.”
    Her face was exhausted. She seemed completely drained, as though someone had siphoned from her everything that made her human.
    “I’m sorry. She’ll come around. She’s still young.”
    She looked as though she needed to be touched. I stood up and hugged her. I’d been a masseuse once, in another life, right after my college years. My grandmother had had arthritis; it comforted her for me to rub her back and shoulder blades, and it soothed me too. So I took a class, and then another, and after a while friends and friends of friends were calling me, setting up appointments, paying me. My first job in LA—after Clyde, Trina, and I moved there from Atlanta—was working as a masseuse in a hot Beverly Hills day spa. Clyde thought it was a pink-collar job, that working with my bare hands demeaned him as he moved up. He reminded me that I had a college degree and nagged me to quit. A public relations firm hired me; later I opened the store. But soothing bodies will always be my gift.
    I kneaded the area on Bethany’s back between her shoulder blades. The knots I felt had absorbed a lot of tension that would take weeks to rub out. When I was just getting started as a masseuse, I’d touched a woman where her emotional pain was stored and she began crying hysterically right on the table. With Bethany I stopped rubbing after a few minutes; it would have taken very little for her to become