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Monday rolled around, and although I hadn’t yet been attacked by either an abusive Yemeni or a whack job letter-writer, I still felt jittery.

Temporarily losing my mind, I opted to go for a run. Not because I wanted to. Not because it was safe to, but because exercise sometimes helps me relax. Of course, high doses of calories will generally put me into a lovely catatonic state, but I had left all of my would-be calories at the grocery store when Ramla called. So I did my three miles of perdition, showered, then locked myself in the bedroom lest Solberg groggily stumbled into the wrong room. After that I got dressed and rushed off to work.

When I say “rushed,” I mean that I drove twenty miles per hour in head-pounding traffic since the 2 was reminiscent of Macy’s parking lot. I actually think I saw some guy serving lemonade from the back of his pickup truck.

Eventually I arrived at the office. Shirley was manning the desk.

“Whoa,” she said as I rushed in the door. It was two minutes before my first client was scheduled to arrive.

I teetered to a halt on wedge cork heels.

“What happened to you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you look like you slept hanging upside down last night.”

“I didn’t.”

“What happened?”

I considered telling her the whole story, but I had a client due to tell me his/her problems in approximately ninety seconds. It probably wouldn’t be good if I was crying about my own. “Just a little trouble in the neighborhood.”

She stared at me. “Umm-huh,” she said finally. “Anyhow, you rushed off without breakfast again, didn’t you?”

“I appreciate—”

“Didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head. Reaching into her bottom drawer, she pulled out a white bag and handed it to me. I peeked inside. A breakfast burrito smiled up at me.

“Get in there now,” she said, and shooed me away. “Hurry up.”

“But don’t I have—”

“I don’t care what you have,” she said. “Nobody can’t do no good on an empty stomach. I’ll keep your first appointment busy until you give me a buzz on the phone.”

I tried to argue, really I did, but in a moment I was alone with the burrito and then it just seemed rude not to eat it.

I’d like to say I felt guilty for my caloric transgressions, but really I felt much better afterward, almost ready to meet my first client of the day.

Mr. Howard Lepinski is a mousy little man with a mustache and a thousand neuroses. He is also one of my greatest successes, someone who had gone from being a patently unhappy man who constantly obsessed about every minute detail of his life to a relatively happy man who only occasionally worried about every minute detail of his life. It had taken a good deal of harsh reality, a divorce, and a new relationship with a woman who didn’t criticize his every breath to reach that pinnacle of sterling sanity.

“How was your weekend?” I asked as he took a seat on my couch.

He wobbled his scrawny neck, a mannerism indicative of his newfound relaxation. When I’d first begun seeing him he’d been as stiff as a kayak paddle.

“So-so. The stocks are still in the pits, my accounts are down by eighteen percent thanks to this danged recession, and I think I’m allergic to raspberry compote,” he said, itching madly at a tiny rash on his arm.

“Raspberry compote?” I said.

He nodded.

“Raspberry compote that your lovely wife made?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Raspberry compote that your lovely wife made because she adores you?”

“Yeah,” he said, and grinning like a contented little spider monkey, forgot all about the stocks and the recession and the tiny rash.

By the time Emily Christianson arrived I almost felt worthy of the psychology license matted and framed on my office wall.

She looked as crisply thin and tightly strung as the first time I had seen her.

“How are you today?” I asked, and settled in for the long haul.

“I am well,” she said, and sat down on the couch. I watched her. Most people are okay. Some are good. A few are awful and actually know it. But not many are “well.”

“Did you get that A minus taken care of?” I asked.

“Mr.