“Do you think it was one of the obscene callers?”

Shahla shrugged. “Who knows? We all get hang ups.”

For some reason Tony felt marginally better about taking the calls. There were some people who didn’t want to talk to him even more than he didn’t want to talk to them.

Five minutes later the phone rang again. He answered it with slightly more confidence.

“Tony?” a female voice said in response to his greeting. “Have I talked to you before?”

“I don’t know,” Tony said. “Who’s this?”

“This is Julie.”

“Hi, Julie.”

Shahla placed the call on the speaker. There was no echo so callers didn’t know they were on a speaker. She reached for the Green Book and riffled through its pages. She set the book in front of Tony so he could read about Julie. Meanwhile, Julie, who had apparently figured out that Tony didn’t know her story, had taken off like a windup toy, talking about her ex-husband who had run away with his secretary, and a number of other men with whom she had apparently had affairs, but who had screwed her in one way or another. This wasn’t just a bad joke; she was crying on the line.

Tony barely had an opportunity to get in an occasional verbal nod, consisting of “Uh huh,” and no opportunity to practice other skills he had learned in the class. He belatedly wrote the time down on a call-report form and scanned the written information about Julie. She had been calling for several years. She complained about men and almost everything else, and her nickname was Motormouth. About all the listener could do was to give an occasional verbal nod and hang on for fifteen minutes.

After a while, Tony realized that some of the incidents Julie was talking about had happened years earlier. He felt like telling her to get over it and get a life. Perhaps it was a good thing he couldn’t get a word in edgewise.