Nickel City Crossfire by Gary Ross (popular romance novels .txt) 📗

“Site visits. What do those involve?”

“If you’ve been to our website, you know we offer comprehensive support services to a lot of other institutions, from schools to community centers. Sometimes site visits mean meeting with agency heads to review what they do for clients. For example, does this or that immigrant family have access to public transportation or health care? If not, we figure out how to make it possible. Sometimes we meet directly with clients themselves to offer face-to-face help. Is this Alzheimer’s patient getting the support she needs to stay home as long as possible? How does this father’s cancer impact his children’s performance in school?”

“So you and Keisha were kind of a tag team on physical and mental health.”

“Yes, on how the two worked together for an individual or family’s quality of life. Sometimes she would do a routine physical and I would do a mental health assessment, and we’d compare notes and come up with a multifaceted treatment plan that worked beautifully. Yes, we were a team, a good one that got better the longer we worked together. Cassidy, the intercom receptionist, used to call us Batgirl and Robin but refused to say who was who.” She smiled then, an almost bittersweet smile that brought color to her cheeks as if she’d remembered something else she was hesitant to share.

I set my pen aside. “Is there something you don’t want me to write down?”

She sighed and her smile widened into the one I had seen online.

“I won’t breach confidentiality by giving you names so you can write whatever you want. Anyway, I doubt this anecdote will help you find Keisha.”

“But it will tell me something about her, something that will help me understand her better.”

She nodded. “I was just thinking about one of the early visits that helped us bond with each other. We paid a home visit to an elderly couple in one of the assisted living facilities—I won’t say which one. They were both in their early eighties and in pretty good shape. A lot of walking. Swimming in the pool. Nine holes of golf once a week for him. Yoga classes for her. That sort of thing.” Even though we were in her office with the door closed, she leaned toward me and lowered her voice a bit. “We’re sitting in their living room, doing a wellness check, when out of the blue the woman says, ‘We don’t screw like we used to. Two or three times a week for fifty years, and now he’s tired all the time and won’t come near me and sometimes I have to rely on BOB to go to sleep but I like to be kissed and BOB can’t kiss me.’”

“No names,” I said.

Ileana shook her head. “Not her husband. B-O-B. Battery-operated boyfriend.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I was brought up in a very proper Greek family.” Ileana sat back, palms flat on her desktop. “I was nobody’s prude and had graduate-level sexuality training and my own fair share of experiences before and after marriage, but the idea of elderly people having sex and actually talking about it and vibrators—well, yes, it caught me off guard. But not Keisha. She never blinked and eased right into a dialogue about variable hormone levels and possible physiological problems and ways they might approach communication. It was a couple’s therapy session that gave the therapist in the room a moment to find her footing.”

“Sounds like a smooth move.”

“It was, and we got to the heart of the problem too, sort of. One of his golf buddies had died some months earlier, and the rumor that ran through the retirement community was that he had died in flagrante with his wife. Our guy didn’t understand how much he’d taken the rumor to heart and withdrawn from his own sex life. Once everything was on the table and we got them talking, they got into a rhythm that made things better. Not three times a week but enough times a month the wife was happy.” She looked off again, and her smile lessened but did not disappear. “That couple had this weird table lamp that looked like it was made out of that famous Remington horse sculpture.”

“The Bronco Buster?”

“Yes, that’s the one. For years, whenever things got dicey, one of us would look at the other and say, ‘Ride her, cowboy!’ and we’d almost fall off our chairs laughing.” She wiped her eyes again.

“Thank you,” I said.

“For what?”

“For cutting my fear of assisted living by ninety percent.”

She laughed and sat forward, and I felt confident she would cooperate with me, not only in this interview but in any follow-ups.

“So Keisha was—is—quite good at what she does,” I said. “Self-assured, sympathetic to the needs of others, and enough of a generalist to address those needs on many fronts.”

“One of the smartest, kindest, most careful and balanced women I’ve ever known.”

I locked eyes with Ileana and made no move to pick up my pen. “Therefore not at all the kind of person one would expect to have a drug problem she could keep secret, at least not secret from you.”

“Exactly. If you used to be a cop, you must know something about drug use patterns. Sure, the desire to get high cuts across all ages, races, and classes, with alcohol and pot being the most common drugs of choice. But most users of illicit drugs begin in adolescence and drift into irregular and casual use by their late twenties. Younger users try opioids for a different kind of high but a lot of older users start with prescription painkillers.”

“The road to heroin is often paved with oxy.”

Ileana nodded. “Keisha is older but has had no accidents, surgery, or pain management issues that required a scrip. Now before you tell me about health professionals who find their maintenance levels and use for a long time, let me tell you about Veronica Surowiec. Yes, she was a medical doctor who worked