I stand and cross over to Kassim, cupping his chin and scanning his face, as if I can detect any change in his eyes after one forty-five-minute session.
“How’d it go?” I ask Dr. Cabbot.
“Good.” He smiles down at Kassim. “Just getting to know each other today.”
“All right,” I say. “So what’d you think so far, Kassim?”
He shrugs. “It’s cool. Can we go, though? There’s aHalotournament this afternoon.”
“Oh, of course.” I grab my purse from the waiting room chair and give him the key fob. “You go to the car. I’ll be right out.”
Through the window, I watch him cross the small parking lot. The lights on my car flash when he unlocks it, and he climbs in. I turn to Dr. Cabbot, forcing myself not to unleash a barrage of questions.
“So what are we dealing with?” I ask him.
“It really was just a day to get to know each other,” Dr. Cabbot says. “We didn’t dive deep, but it is obvious he has a good bit of uncertainty about the future, and a lot of understandable fear about losing people he loves.”
“Even if we decide he shouldn’t skip the grade, I’m glad we brought him in. I know the value of a safe place to share your thoughts and burdens.”
“It’s great you got him here to talk things through.”
It’s so affirming, even that simplest sprinkling of praise. It makes me realize how arid I’ve been inside, how badly I’ve needed watering. Dr. Abrams always says I need to be kinder to myself. Based on the way I responded to first Hendrix and now Dr. Cabbot reinforcing that I’m doing a good job as a mom, I think she might be right.
Chapter Twelve
Josiah
So tell me a little about yourself.”
Seriously?
“Uh, what do you want to know?” I ask the therapist seated across from me in a leather recliner identical to the one I’m sitting in.
“The intake form you completed told me a lot about the things that have happened to you,” Dr. Musa replies, resting his elbows on the arms of the recliner and steepling his fingers. “But not much about your life if that makes sense.”
“If the intake form told you what’s happened to me, don’t you then know about my life?”
Dark brows rise above his black-rimmed glasses. “Not necessarily. Someone else could have lost both parents at a really young age, lost the caretaker who raised him, lost a child and a marriage, all in the matter of a year or so, and processed it completely differently. There are infinite doors to choose when we lose things and people that are important to us. A million ways to grieve. I’d like to know which doors you chose.”
A harsh chuckle rattles in my throat at his unaffected cataloging of my life’s shit luck. “So we just diving in, huh?”
“I’m a good judge of people,” Dr. Musa says with a smile. “I sense you’re a man who likes to get right to it.”
The locs hanging to his shoulders are peppered with gray, but the face they’re pulled away from is relatively unlined. He’s probably not that much older than I am. I take in the African masks and art decorating the walls, certificates and degrees interspersed between them.
“I see you’re a Morehouse man.” I study his undergrad diploma: Bachelor of Arts in Psychology.
“I am. You?”
“I was there, yeah. Business degree.”
“Nothing like it, huh?” he asks, his smile relaxing around the shared experiences specific to HBCUs that others wouldn’t fully grasp.
“Nothing like the House, nope.” I shift my gaze to his other degrees from Emory and Yale. “Looks like you’re a smart man. All these degrees gonna tell you what’s wrong with me?”
“Do you think there’s something wrong with you?”
“No, nothing’s wrong with me.” I cross my ankle over my knee, eyeing the box of tissues on the table beside him with amusement. Won’t be needing that. “No disrespect to what you do here, but I don’t need this. I’m doing it for my son.”