“Would it have to be a package deal?” Brock Weaver asked as he scribbled a hasty note in his notebook. He was a long, lean man of thirty-seven with an incongruous halo of golden curls.
“I can’t get away from her.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve tried, believe me. She always comes along and moves in on me. Next time I’m not going to leave a forwarding address or anything. I’m just going to make a clean break once and for all.”
“You’re planning to move away?”
“As far as I can, as soon as I can afford it.”
“Maybe it would be better to stay and try to resolve your problems with your mother.”
“Impossible. You wouldn’t say that if you knew Good Old Mom.”
“It’s not so unusual for a young woman not to hit it off so well with her mother. Then, as the years go by, she finds herself identifying more with her.”
“Heaven forbid.”
“Mother-daughter relationships often improve with age.”
“You don’t know my mother.”
“Do you think I should? Perhaps some joint counseling—”
Phoebe flopped back in her chair and rolled her eyes. “Oh, wow!”
“Why do you say that, Phoebe?”
“My mother thinks you guys are all quacks. She’d never come within a mile of you.
“She doesn’t even know I come here.”
“Maybe it’s time you told her. Maybe she should know how distressed you are about your relationship with her.”
“She knows how distressed I am. Believe me, she knows, and she loves it.”
Brock put the notebook down on the table next to his chair. He folded long, thin hands on one knee and regarded her with baby blue eyes. He wore blue-jeans and a blue sweater and the longest sneakers Phoebe had ever seen on human feet. “So often,” he said kindly, “people suffer needlessly because they don’t communicate. They assume the other person knows how they feel when really they haven’t an inkling.”
Phoebe’s brown gaze fell before Brock’s steady blue one. Looking down at her hands, she traced invisible circles on the knees of her own jeans. “It’s not possible to communicate with my mother,” she muttered uneasily. “You just don’t understand.”
“You do it every day,” he said. “Every time you speak to her — that’s communication. All you need to do now is find the right kind of communication. I think I’m going to give you an assignment this week, Phoebe. You don’t have to mention me, but every day until we meet again I want you to tell your mother about at least one thing she does that distresses you. And then you must ask her what you do that distresses her.”
“And then if I’m the one who’s still alive next Wednesday, I’ll keep our appointment.”
Brock laughed and patted her knee. “It won’t be as bad as all that. You may even be pleasantly surprised.”
“Sure,” Phoebe said.
Actually, Phoebe thought as she drove her sick old car home, what I ought to do is see if I can land Brock. He knew everything about her. It would make life so simple because she wouldn’t have to lie to him or try to keep him from meeting her mother. The problem was — though she was fond of him — he did not excite her romantically. She couldn’t get past that halo of golden curls, she supposed, and he was way too tall. He stood at least six six to her five two, and he was not by any stretch handsome with his short little nose and long chin. Handsomeness was not a prerequisite with her, but she did prefer that her men not be funny looking and Brock was... sort of. Still, she did like him tremendously. If she married Brock — well, he’d know how to handle a mother-in-law like Felicia Hooks.
Of course Brock was thoroughly professional. He had ethics up to his earlobes. In the six weeks she’d been seeing him, he’d never made a pass at her. But it had happened before. Doctors had married their patients, and shrinks had married their clients. Yes, her life would be so much simpler if she married Brock, who knew so much about her, but when she tried to imagine them sharing a bed she had to laugh.
When Phoebe reached her apartment building, a square stucco affair with a red California tile roof, she parked the car and crossed a small yard carpeted with pungent, multicolored leaves to climb stairs to the second floor. The last time she had moved away from Good Old Mom, she had intentionally leased a tiny one bedroom apartment so she wouldn’t have room for her. Now she slept on the couch every night while Mom occupied the bedroom.
She had lived alone for two blissful months while Felicia, as usual, simply refused to pay rent at the old address. Then, again as usual, she’d been evicted and had turned up at Phoebe’s door with three suitcases, several large wooden crates, and her green parakeet in his cage.
