Brett wasn’t a counselor. As Ella had said that night on the boat—he paid others to do the work.
“What causes the tension?” he asked because Jeff seemed to need to talk.
Shrugging, Jeff shook his head.
“Is it money?”
“Maybe. I’m definitely more irritable when stocks are down.”
Not uncommon after a bad day at work.
“Look at me,” Brett said.
Jeff slowly turned his head. But he didn’t hold Brett’s gaze for long. Clearly his shame was too great.
“Jeff?”
The other man turned his head again. “Are drugs involved?”
“No.”
“And there’s no pressing debt? Are you gambling?”
“No! Of course not! If I knew I had a pr
oblem, don’t you think I’d tell you? Tell myself, for God’s sake? I’m losing the only thing in the world I care about!”
“Okay. Okay.” Stereotypes, profiling, weren’t going to help here. Because the answers weren’t always easy.
Weren’t always clear or neat or clean.
“So when did it start? What caused you to lash out the first time? How long has it been building?”
Jeff sat for a long time. Brett heard the front door open and close. Hoped to God that Chloe was going straight to The Lemonade Stand. Or to Ella, who would take her there.
He needed to call Ella. To warn her.
“You know...” Jeff sat up a little straighter. “I’ll tell you exactly when it started,” he said. “It was after Cody was born. Chloe was really struggling with her postpartum depression. I had to take time off work to stay home with her and take care of the baby. She’d follow me from room to room. Lie on the floor beside my desk when I was trying to get my work done. I get paid on commission, and I see money going out the door right and left, my marriage is pretty much empty and now I’ve got this tiny little human being who needs me 24/7. It’s like there wasn’t enough of me to go around...”
Reminded of how he felt when Ella had handed him the home pregnancy test results when he’d come through the door all those years before, Brett wished he couldn’t relate.
But he could.
“I wasn’t ever going to be able to do enough,” Jeff was saying. “I couldn’t provide enough. If Chloe wasn’t going to be able to contribute, I’d need a cleaning person, a babysitter, and I had to start a college fund, too. The pressure was always there, pushing me harder and harder.”
“But things got better. Chloe got better.”
“I know. That’s why I didn’t think we had a problem. Everything was fine.” Jeff hung his head. “Or I thought it was.”
“I’m guessing you’ve got some anger built up over it all.” Brett said the only thing that made sense to him.
“I know that every time the stocks go down now, even when I know the recovery is going to follow, I get that same feeling I had right after Cody was born. Like I’m strangling, and there’s nothing I can do...”
“You need help.”
“Yeah.”
“You can get through this, Jeff. You and Chloe.”