Free Lynn Osterkamp - Cleo Sims 03 - Too Many Secrets by Lynn Osterkamp

we
got married, I couldn’t stay in your house. And we have other issues. Like
trust. Years ago he deserted me to go off to Mexico to find himself. What’s to
say he won’t do it again?” I didn’t want to end up feeling like the Moxie
members do about their ex-husbands.
    Gramma looked intently at me. “Happy,” she said.
“Be happy.”
    “I want to,” I said, my voice breaking. “But I
don’t know how you and Grampa did it so well. Sometimes I feel smothered by
Pablo. Like this week. He’s been in California for training since Monday. He’s
called me every night, full of questions and advice to make sure I’m taking
care of myself. He acts like I can’t manage on my own. And I haven’t even told
him what I’m working on for Bruce. I can’t tell him, because I know he’d be
mad. That says something.”
    Gramma patted my arm. She couldn’t know what I was talking
about, but she could tell I was upset. Much as I needed her support, it was
time to pull myself together, before she got depressed or agitated.
“You’re such a sweetheart, Gramma,” I said smiling at her. I moved
back over to her chair and gave her another kiss and some hugs. “I think
it’s almost lunchtime. Let’s go out to the kitchen and see what they’re
fixing.”
    § § §
    I had agreed to meet my fourth Moxie member, Diana, late that
afternoon. She’s a physical therapist and a massage therapist and she had
invited me to come to her office to talk, after which she’d give me a massage.
At first I thought I shouldn’t accept, but then I figured why not. The Moxie
women aren’t my clients. Bruce is. And he just wants me to get information. And
a massage sounded wonderful.
    Diana works at Holistic Energy, a wellness and rehabilitation
clinic that offers physical therapy, massage, Pilates, therapeutic yoga, and
other helpful services. The clinic occupies a large section of a fairly new
modern building in east Boulder. I sat in the waiting room for a few minutes
along with a fit young guy wearing a knee brace and a young woman with a
shoulder immobilizer. I figured Diana and the other therapists must be doing
well. Boulder is full of athletes—both elite and aspiring—fertile
ground for clinics like this one.
    She came out wearing a sleeveless black tee shirt and loose
gray drawstring pants, and took me back to a massage room equipped with
comfortable chairs as well as a massage table. “I know you want to talk
about Sabrina,” she said as we sat down, “but I’m not sure what you
want to know.”
    I took a minute to relax into the room’s dim lighting and
soft music, then pulled myself back to the reason I was there. “Just tell
me about Sabrina,” I said. “Anything you think might be important to
finding out what happened to her.”
    Diana flexed the muscles in her right arm as she drummed her
fingers on the arm of her chair. “Sabrina is a loving, caring person and a
good friend, but she’s so co-dependent—always taking care of people,
rescuing people, always putting other people’s needs ahead of her own.”
She rolled her eyes. “I hate to say this, but her helpfulness is her fatal
flaw.”
    I’m not a fan of pop-psych jargon. Why pathologize the
tendency to put others’ needs ahead of your own by calling it co-dependency? As
a nurse, taking care of people was Sabrina’s job. I needed more information to
see it as a flaw rather than expected behavior from a helping professional.
“Besides being a nurse and taking care of her son Ian, who else does she
take care of?”
    Diana put her palms together in front of her chest, wrists
flexed, and raised and lowered her arms several times. “I like to keep my
muscles loose,” she said. “Now what were you asking? Oh, right, who
Sabrina takes care of. She’ll take care of anyone she thinks needs something
whether or not the person wants her help. When she started Moxie, she acted way
overly maternal toward us. She’d take care of all of us, if we let her. But