Habit by T. J. Brearton Page B

for another button down, white. He felt oddly overdressed, like he ought to be in jeans and a t-shirt. He wondered how Olivia Jane kept her hours. Here it was mid-week and she was gardening at four p.m. Likely she made her own schedule.
    “So,” he said, “How does it work? With your . . . field? You’re out on your own, so to speak?”
    She nodded, her head half-buried in the greenery. “I got my licensure a few years ago after working with the county. I started my own private practice. Thing is, grief very often doesn’t want to come to you. You have to go to it.”
    “Denial,” he said softly.
    She retreated from the garden bed and glanced at him approvingly. “Exactly. The first step in the process of absorbing a tragedy or a loss doesn’t exactly get them out and about and ready to talk feelings.”
    Her attention returned to the vegetables. She started pulling several out, clumping them together. Bright orange carrots. “So I continue to work with Oneida, but it’s not at the clinic. They call me when someone has . . . well, you know.”
    “Right. So, how was he?”
    “Well,” she said, grunting and getting to her feet, “that’s a good question.” She turned and dropped the bunch of carrots in the wheel barrow. Then she dusted off her hands. “Let me go wash up. You drink iced coffee?”
    “Sure.”
    “Okay. Thanks for letting me finish that up. I hate leaving things undone.”
    “Me too,” he said. He followed her back into the house.
     
    * * *
     
    She sat him at the dining room table. The white curtains blew in the breeze coming in from the casement windows, which were swung open about half the way. She washed up and spent only a minute making the iced coffee – there was already coffee brewed in a pot on the stove, and she poured this over ice cubes, and added milk and sugar, per his approval. Then she sat down across from him.
    “Kevin is experiencing the acute loss of his sister, of that there is no question,” she said, affecting an instantaneously professional demeanor. “He also is a very troubled young guy.”
    “In what way?”
    She shrugged. “In every way. He resents his family, he is shiftless, without a job or what he feels is a calling. He doesn’t want his family’s money but he needs to live, so he feels bad about taking an allowance. He has no spiritual ballast that he can describe. He’s basically atheist, which there isn’t anything wrong with, but in his case, he’s searching for something.”
    “Where was he this morning? At the motel?”
    She raised an eyebrow. “That’s where your job begins and mine ends, Mr. Healy. I didn’t inquire as to his whereabouts. I tried to help him deal with the pain and loss of his departed older sister. My job is to help people try to find the coping mechanisms in their own lives to help them face the immense challenges that come with the loss of a loved one. It’s not easy. Most people, they do what they know how to do. They drink, they retreat into themselves, they engage in some sort of compulsive behavior, anything to keep distracted, to keep the pain and grief away. I’m not all rah rah, siss boom bah, bring on the pain; that’s not the point. You don’t try to cultivate grief where there is none, or make yourself suffer if you are not. Sure, there’s healing in a good cry, but some people just don’t cry. Kevin, he’s not a stoic. I think his father is, but he’s not. He’s more sensitive. But he has no way to cope that I could see, or he could share with me.”
    “He seemed okay when I was with him,” Brendan said. He raised a hand from his coffee to indicate he wasn’t being argumentative. “I mean, he was certainly distraught. Which is why I wanted him to see . . . someone. But he seemed to be dealing.”
    He made a mental note that Olivia had mentioned the father, Alex, as if she knew something about him.
    “Sure, Kevin was dealing. I deal. You deal. We all deal. We’re more afraid of social