You don't end up as a state-employed therapist if you had much ability in college. I sometimes pretend that I didn't distinguish myself in graduate school because I marched to a different dnunmer. But I didn't. As one kind professor gently and brutally told me, I wasn't cut out for science. But I was sure I was cut out for the art of therapy. Ever since I comforted my mother during her final year of cancer, I had believed I had a knack for helping people get straight in their minds. I was everybody's confidant.
Somehow I had never supposed, though, that I would end up trying to help the hopeless in a part of the state where even the healthy didn't have much to live for. Yet that's all I had the credentials for, and when I (so maturely) told myself I was over the initial disappointment, I made the best of it.
Elaine was the best of it.
"Raining raining raining," was the greeting I got when I visited her on the third day of the wet spell.
"Don't I know it?" I said. "My hair's soaking wet."
"Wish mine was," Elaine answered.
"No, you don't. You'd get sick."
"Not me," she said.
"Well, Mr. Woodbury told me you're depressed. I'm supposed to make you happy."
"Make it stop raining."
"Do I look like God?"
"I thought maybe you were in disguise. I'm in disguise," she said. It was one of our regular games. "I'm really a large Texas armadillo who was granted one wish. I wished to be a human being. But there wasn't enough of the armadillo to make a full human being; so here I am." She smiled. I smiled back.