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“Like what? You sound like you’ve just been stood up for prom. Whoa. That's it, isn’t it?” She reached over and swatted my knee, a smile emerging like she’d just delivered a punch line.

“Hm.” I folded my arms across my chest. “Well, since that never happened to me, I wouldn’t know. Why, was that something you have personal experience with? Maybe you should tell me.”

My meanness slapped the smile off Cathryn's face. Her mouth rippled into a smirk.

“Nice try, but you’re not going to start a fire to take the heat off yourself. You need to own this one. Carl's not being here is about you, not him.”

The roller coaster in my stomach chugged its way up my throat. I waved my hand in front of her. “Wait. Gotta …” I dashed for the bathroom, hoping the wheels would stop turning in my mouth before I retched them up.

Drunk vomiting had been welcomed. Cathartic, sober vomiting, not so much. The insides of my nose burned, and the sourness of the lasagna that recycled itself out of my stomach and into the toilet lingered on my tongue. Maybe I should have reconsidered that whole gum-chewing decision. I shuffled to the sink, latched onto the sides of it to steady myself, and dared look into the mirror.

The damp black, supposedly waterproof mascara puddled in the corners of my eyes. If only I could throw up the sadness and its emotional tug on my face. I searched for a fragment of long-ago Leah lurking in eyes shaded by doubt and confusion. God, if you’re really there, wherever there happens to be, now what? What do I do when I don’t know what to do?

No answer.

Where was that thundering God of the Old Testament? He's the one I needed. The God of the burning bush. Not the God of screaming silence.

I turned on the faucet, cupped my hands to catch the cold water, swished it around my mouth, and spit.

The lower half of my red wrap dress bunched up into itself. I smoothed it with the palms of my hands and wished I had another reason to stay in the bathroom. My guilt over my temper tantrum blocked my way to the door.

Can’t hide in here all night. You need to apologize to Cathryn.

My lips didn’t move, but the message could not have been any clearer had the face in the mirror actually spoken the words.

Maybe God's not mute.

Maybe I needed hearing aids.

“Leah?”

I opened the door and saw Cathryn's raised fist aimed at my forehead.

“I was going to apologize, really. No need for violence,” I said.

“I was about to knock. Really.” She rolled her blue eyes in her best Leah imitation. “But more about that later.” She twisted her ponytail on top of her head and secured it with a pencil she pulled out of her pocket. “You have company,” she whispered and waved her left arm in the direction of the nurses’ desk.

I took a few steps forward and heard Carl's voice before I spotted him leaning against the counter talking to Matthew and another man.

Carl bent down to tie the leather laces of his deck shoes— those things were always a problem—and I almost tripped over my own feet when I saw the broadly smiling, fast-talking, hand-gesturing man who stood next to him: my father.

26

Fashionably late arrivals work well for parties, not for family therapy sessions.

Even though Matthew practically oiled the hinge to slide the door open quietly, and Trey's eyebrows shifted less than a centimeter when the three of us coasted across the Berber carpet, our arrival shifted the group's emotional universe. Even a whisper can knock down a house of cards.

“Dad, this dude Paul said to the Romans not to get all eaten up with bad. He said—” A lip-pierced, gangly Doug of the future, stopped mid-sentence and scanned Carl, Dad, and me as we lowered ourselves into the only empty folding chairs in the room.

Definitely clueless as to group therapy protocol, Dad raised a hand and said, “Late plane. My son-in-law over there—” he reached around me and pointed to Carl “—had to drive like a bat to get us here. And in one piece too.” He smiled