Free Trouble Won't Wait by Autumn Piper Page A

down the runway with only the newest bra and panties on. She’s blond and female, but that’s about all we have in common. I label the attachment Me getting dressed this morning .
    Now I absolutely have to do invoices for the company, and then run down to the post office to mail some payments and the Christmas cards. Downtown, I bump into another PTA mom, and we go to lunch. I’m not getting much work done today. We share in-law horror stories, gossip about things at the school, and part, laughing.
    It’s time for my walk when I get home. Exuberant from my good day, I find Adam waiting in his back yard when I run into the cemetery. His smile only lifts me higher. Life is good. We chat for exactly twenty minutes over a bottle of water near the horse pasture, before I have to leave so I can be showered and waiting when Rachel gets home. Adam thanks me for my emailed photos and winks at me as I walk away. Memories of him keep me smiling all the way to my house.
    * * * *
    After dinner, Mike makes it a point to hug me in front of the kids, and my happy mood is spoiled. He knows I won’t rebuff him with them watching. As his hug grows longer, I grow more distressed by this confinement, his abuse of power. When he forces a kiss on me, I bite his lower lip hard enough to show him I mean business. There’s no blood, but his watering eyes tell me it stung. He releases me without a word.
    * * * *
    Morning. After another night spent crying myself to sleep. Mike isn’t going to work until after our little appointment. He carries on a sweet, one-sided conversation on the way there while I gaze out the truck window, wondering how we ended up in marriage counseling.
    I believe we’re the only couple we know from our generation still together. That’s very sad. Lasting marriages seem to have gone the way of console TVs and AM radio. They’re still out there, but you don’t hear much about them anymore. And, like many marriages, a lot of those TVs aren’t working, but folks can’t bring themselves to abandon them.
    This counselor just joined a local practice of several mental health specialists, located in a new Roman-looking office building full of other everyday professionals. Nice. The accountants can look out their windows past the faux-stone pillars and watch the crazies and folks with their marriages on the rocks come and go.
    What Will People Think Phobia makes me deeply fearful someone we know will see us, but there’s no way around it. Sooner or later, all the fools I graduated with who looked at me with envy at our ten-year reunion for my sexy, successful, doting husband will know I couldn’t keep him. I could keep him if I want to, I guess, but they’ll think I couldn’t.
    With a courage-faking breath, I follow the other half of my failed marriage into the office, where he tells the receptionist we’re here to see “Baldwin.”
    “Baldwin?” I repeat in a whisper, when we are seated in a corner. “Not Dr. Baldwin ?”
    Mike shakes his head. “He’s from Aspen, and he only has one name, not a last one, or first one, whichever. Just one name, and he doesn’t use Doctor . He wants to be on a level with his clients. They told me when I made the appointment.”
    I’m laughing inside. Our therapist is a nut job! Mike has commissioned a totally off-the-wall counselor to try to mend a marriage I refuse to see fixed. My life has become a twisted comedy. Funny to an onlooker, but soul-rending to me.
    “Mike and Mandy?” Baldwin ushers us into an office with several tiny fountains tinkling, incense burning and zen music playing. I roll my eyes at Mike, and he tries to conceal his amusement. This is the kind of joke we would get off on. In the past, that is.
    We’re both smiling entirely too much when Baldwin faces us on the loveseat, sitting in an armchair across from us. He’s in his late twenties, with long straw-like hair, and bangs in dire need of trimming–bangs! Although he’s dressed in a suit, I