“No, thanks.”
“Trying to cut down, myself.” Alonzo perused my résumé. “Twenty-four years old. Graduated from Webster High, South Carolina. Straight to work at the Richmond Rehab Clinic for… six years?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why’d you quit? Or did you get fired?”
“It shut down.” I cleared my throat and indicated my résumé. “There’s a letter of recommendation on the back, there.”
“Oh yes, here it is.” Alonzo leaned back and read the letter from my former supervisor. “Wow. Says here you were an ‘exemplary employee’ and that he wishes he’d had ten just like you.” He folded his hands on his stomach and looked at me. “Not bad, not bad. RRC was for drug addicts. How’d that go for you?”
“Good.”
“Care to elaborate?”
Don’t fuck this up. Just talk.
“I showed up on time,” I said. “Never missed a day.”
I let out a breath. No stutter on a sentence that had three of my worst consonants. D, n, m, s, and f were my nemeses, but d was the King Dick of them all. My stuttering over Doris’ name drove her batshit crazy, so she’d smack me on the back of my head. “Spit it out, you big d-d-dummy.”
“What about patient interaction?”
“Not much,” I said. “I did my job.”
“You ever deal with brain injury cases?”
I shook my head.
“I worked in all kinds of facilities, myself,” he said. “Drug rehab too. And I can tell you these brain injuries are a whole different ball of wax. Drug addicts, for one thing, are still themselves. That ain’t always the case here. We have twenty-seven residents at Blue Ridge and some of them ain’t all there anymore.” He tapped his forehead. “You have to learn their case histories. How to talk to them properly. The slightest wrong words could set them off or confuse them. Can you handle that?”
“I think so.”
I hardly had to speak at all at RRC, which was why I liked the job. But the idea of participating in the patients’ care at Blue Ridge tried to reawaken a distant dream of mine—to help kids like me with speech impairments. Kids who felt stupid and frustrated every damn minute of their life. It was a dream born of my stutter but that died with it too.
Who wanted their stuttering kid to be treated by a stuttering therapist?
No one, that’s who, you big dummy, Doris offered.
“Contrary to local rumor,” Alonzo was saying, “this isn’t a psychiatric hospital. None of the residents—residents, not patients—are here for emotional issues. They’re all here because of injury. Accidents, mostly. But everyone here is suffering from permanent brain damage. Our job is to help them adjust to their new reality.”
“Okay.”
Alonzo leaned back in his chair, folded his hands over his stomach. “Why do you want to work here, son?”
A thousand professional-sounding, bullshit answers rose to my mouth and tangled up.
I inhaled slowly and exhaled the truth.
“I want to help.”
Alonzo studied me through narrowed eyes, then glanced down at my résumé. “You settled in pretty deep at RRC. Made yourself at home, did you?”
Made myself a home.
“Why not go to college? You want to clean up after sick people for the rest of your life?”
I shrugged.