Free The Good Luck of Right Now by Matthew Quick

even have your beer at the bar. I really believe you should go. Truly. Truly. Truly. But I’m also required to convince you to go. I’m getting graded on this. All of my classmates have convinced their clients to attend group therapy already, and you’re starting to make me look bad. I shouldn’t be saying all this to you; I know that. But would you please just go to group therapy for my sake? So they don’t throw me out of my grad class? Would you do it for me? Please?” Wendy put her hands together like she was begging me. The bruise on her wrist jumped out of her sleeve once more, ugly as a cockroach emerging from under a floorboard. The tiny man delivered a swift kick to my kidney. Then Wendy raised her eyebrows and said, “Pretty please?”
    “My going to group therapy would help you do well in grad school?” I asked. This seemed to put the idea in a different light—going to group therapy to help Wendy rather than to help myself. I don’t know why this made group therapy more appealing, but it did, maybe because I didn’t need help and didn’t want to waste my time doing something that wouldn’t help anyone.
    “It would help a lot , actually. More than you realize. I’m not doing very well in school lately.”
    “If I go to group therapy, will you do something for me?” I asked, because I suddenly had a good idea.
    “Sure! Anything!” Wendy said, practically leaping from her chair.
    “Would you maybe give me lessons on how to impress a woman?”
    Wendy made a lemon face and said, “What do you mean?”
    “I want to know how to approach a woman so that she might want to have a beer at the bar with me.”
    “You’re elevating the stakes of your goal, Bartholomew.”
    “Is that good?”
    “It’s very good!”
    She seemed really happy. She is such a child. So easily pleased.
    “Can you help me?” I said.
    “Who’s the girl?”
    “I don’t want to tell you.”
    “Okay,” she said, smiling under those thin orange eyebrows. I made the heart constellation out of her freckles once very quickly. “I see how it is.”
    “I’ve never been on a date before.”
    “That’s okay.”
    “You don’t think of me as a retard now that I’ve told you I’ve never been on a date?”
    “I don’t think of anyone as a retard , because that’s a word that shouldn’t ever be used.”
    I smiled.
    “It’s an age-appropriate goal,” Wendy said. “I’m definitely in.”
    “So?”
    “So what?”
    “How do I make it happen?”
    “Why don’t you let me think up a course of action, and we’ll talk about it next week. We’ll fix you up and do our best to get you the girl, Bartholomew. I promise,” Wendy said. She wrote something down on a piece of paper, tore it out, and handed it to me.
    Surviving Grief
    Monday 8pm
    1012 Walnut Street
    Third Floor
    Tell Arnold I sent you.
    “You’ll go?” she said.
    I looked at the piece of paper.
    Surviving Grief
    “Okay,” I said. “I’ll go.”
    Just then, the front door banged open. Father McNamee was standing there, his face red with cold. “Has our dear Wendy talked you into throwing me out on the streets yet, Bartholomew?” he asked as he charged through the living room.
    Wendy took a deep breath—and then she exhaled audibly through her lips. She stood, met Father McNamee at the kitchen entranceway, and said, “Why did you ask me to help Bartholomew if you don’t respect my opinion?”
    “I respectfully disagree with your opinion,” Father McNamee said. “But I still respect it very much.”
    “I don’t understand what type of game you’re playing here,” Wendy said.
    Father McNamee chuckled and winked at me.
    “I’m reporting your whereabouts to Father Hachette,” Wendy said.
    “I no longer answer to the Catholic Church. I defrocked myself.”
    “I don’t understand what’s going on, but I don’t like it! Not one bit!” Wendy yelled.
    She punched her way into her floral-pattern trench coat, grabbed her bag off the kitchen