Six Strokes Under Read Online Free Page A

hunter's shirt. He looked hot and just this side of losing it. He looked like he never should have left the back hills of Arkansas or West Virginia or wherever the hell he came from. His sign read, "Leviticus 18:22: You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination." Only God knew why this guy marched outside my shrink's office waving a sign that, by all appearances, hammered homosexuals.
    One of Myrtle Beach's finest black-and-whites (tan-and-chromes, if you wanted to get technical) screeched up to the pickets. Two officers hopped out and began arguing with the protesters about how many paces away from the building they would have to stand. Too bad I had to go. This was obviously going to be a lot more exciting than anything Dr. Baxter and I could drum up.
    "Tough neighborhood you live in," I said, pointing out the window to the police cars, as I took my seat in Dr. Baxter's inner sanctum.
    "Um-hum," he said.
    I could tell We weren't going to have much of a conversation if I stuck to that topic. So I talked about meeting Kaitlin and getting ready for Q-school.
    "The weirdest thing," I told him, "is the way Mom's reacting. You'd think she'd be delirious with happiness that I'm finally going for my dream. Instead, all she can talk about is how could I do this to her, how could I get involved in something that will only remind her every day of how my father left her. Her latest maneuver is pretending I'm not going at all."
    "In her mind, the feelings of rage and disappointment towards your father are still fresh," said Dr. Baxter. "They're like a touchstone for her. She goes back to them over and over. They're painful, but in a familiar way. Like touching your tongue to a rotten tooth." He leaned back in his chair and stroked his beard, a pose I thought he must have learned in shrink school. Something they pull out when they're moving in for the kill but don't want to alarm the prey. "You have other choices," he said. "How does it really feel to be going to qualifying school?"
    "Okay," I said. "Fine."
    He sighed. "Your mother stays stuck in her old feelings. You sometimes don't let yourself know what yours are."
    "What does that mean?" I said. "I know what I feel. I just don't see the point of wallowing around in the past. You want me to break down and blubber about how scared I am. How's that going to help me?"
    "You keep a distance from your feelings," said Dr. Baxter. "You're like a caddie to your own life—reading the wind, checking how the ball lies, studying the yardage book. You wait for someone else to hit the shot, rather than get involved."
    I rolled my eyes. Like he had a clue about being a caddie. It was just as hard as playing golf, maybe harder. You had to carry the emotional weight of someone else's performance without having even a shred of real control over how the thing turned out. Let him spend one afternoon lugging Mike Callahan's bag around a golf course, trying to keep him from blowing sky high. Then he could tell me I wasn't involved.
    "Q-school sounds like good news," said Dr. Baxter, interrupting my internal rampage. "You're putting yourself back in your life, not standing by watching on the sidelines."
    I didn't say anything. I wasn't trying to be difficult or rude. But I still wasn't comfortable with this therapy thing, this constant stream of personal feedback, often way more than I wanted to hear, from someone I really hardly knew. And most annoying of all, he was usually right. Inthis case, though, I refused to jinx my chances by digging too far into the mixture of exhilaration and pure terror that flooded me when I thought about Q-school.
    "What are you thinking?" he asked after a long silence.
    "I'm wondering about repressed memories of sexual abuse. How accurate you think they are and what you'd say if a patient came in remembering something from years before."
    His eyebrows drew together into one fuzzy gray line and he cleared his throat. "You've remembered something from your