got home it wasn’t quite yet noon. She went straight to her room and fell asleep for three hours.
She started work the following Monday. She arrived early, but not so early that she had to walk around for half an hour. Brigid was there. Brigid would work with her for the first few days. This comforted her.
This time, she stopped and said hello to the same group of smokers that were there on the day of her interview, and introduced herself.
“Are you going to work here?” a man with a mustache asked. He sounded angry.
“Yes.”
“I’m Carol,” the woman said, her voice breathy and raspy from smoke. “Nice to meet you.” Carol’s face was pockmarked. Her hair was greasy and she was very overweight.
“Nice to meet all of you,” Mary said and entered the house.
Brigid was in the office with the door open, dispensing meds. A few clients waited patiently as she scooped out a number of pills and put them in their hands.
“You’re early.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” Brigid said, as the last person waiting took their meds. “You like to apologize, don’t you?”
“I don’t know.” Mary reddened.
“You know what they say about people who are early?”
“What?”
“They’re anxious. Early people are anxious, on-time people are obsessive compulsive, and late people are hostile, or passive-aggressively hostile.”
“I never read that in any of my psych books.”
“I bet you haven’t.”
The shift was eight hours, from nine until five. She also would have a night shift once a week, which was six hours long, from five until eleven. At that point, the house was locked up until the morning. Brigid introduced her to all of the clients that were lingering around, showed her the rooms they slept in, the bathrooms, the two common rooms. One of the common rooms, on the ground floor, had a television set turned on at all times. This was where the majority of the clients hung out. Toward the end of the shift, Brigid took her in to the office and closed the door.
“So, what do you think?”
“Well, it all seems fine.” Mary didn’t know what to say.
“I’ll write in the log book, but I thought you might want to know how that goes, or talk to me about anything you may have observed.”
“Okay.”
Brigid held the log book in her lap and swiveled the chair around to where Mary sat on the couch. “Well, I think Carol seems depressed. She’s manic depressive and I think she may be cycling into a depression.”
“What should we do?”
“Make note of it, for one. And then bring it up during meeting time.”
This didn’t seem like doing a whole lot. “Can we do anything for her?”
Brigid smiled. “Like what?”
“Well, treat her in some way?”
“We could maybe up her anti-depressants. Listen, I was going to assign you two clients to spend extra time with. Everyone here has two clients who they take out for coffee or something like that, about once a week. Of course, you can only take them out if there is another person here. But I’m often here, as you’ll find out. If you are here alone, you can spend some time with them in their room. It’s an hour a week, approximately. Would you like Carol to be one of them?”
“Okay.” Mary didn’t actually want Carol. Carol disgusted her. But that was what she was here for, she told herself. To help these people.
“And how about Bob?”
“The skinny man with the glasses?”
“Yes. He’s a paranoid schizophrenic and he’s also mildly retarded. We call that dual-diagnosed. He’s a sweetie. He loves to go to the pizza place for coffee. Although, we’re trying to cut back his coffee intake. Try and get him to get decaf. The caffeine makes him more paranoid, you see.”
“I see.”
By Friday, Mary felt ready for something and she wasn’t sure what it was, but it turned out she was ready to get drunk for the first time in her life. Or at least, that’s what happened.
Darrell and Clay were having a party. They, too,
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