“Quiet? Is that how you see me?”

“The spirit animal you called to you is the deer. It wants to work with you if you’ll let it. It wants to help you deal with an upcoming challenge. To help you steer the compassion you have for everyone else inward to yourself.”

The kindness in his voice almost undid me. I felt tears coming, and then, of course, there was Holly. I didn’t know how long she’d been standing there watching. It would have been fine to have her interrupt the session with a loud “Let’s go!” But to have her watch me, tearful, while I stood too close to a man clutching a chicken feather fan—ugh. I didn’t know what I thought of it, but for certain I would never hear the end of this. Her unwavering belief was that thoughts alone created the kind of life you deserved, but I knew talk of a spirit animal was a bridge too far. If she didn’t understand Katie’s need for Peanut, she sure as Shinola wasn’t going to understand a ghostly deer that wanted to help me stand up for myself. And maybe that was what I needed, but I wasn’t going to have Holly bully my possibly fake spirit deer.

Then I saw it, the famous Holly smirk.

“Isn’t Marvin amazing?” Summer flitted into the room, all blonde hair and shiny skin. All savior and sweetness.

I wiped my eyes. “Okay. Thanks,” I mumbled to Marvin, hoping to slam my spirit door closed.

Summer hefted her bag onto her tiny shoulder, and the folder with all the camper documents slid out of view. My chance to be free from her over.

“It’s normal to cry,” he insisted. “Sometimes people laugh or feel anger. Everything is normal here.”

I nodded, sneaking a look at Holly, who managed skepticism, impatience, and authority in one twitch of her eyebrow. Embarrassed by my need to be accepted by her while gifting her another reason to reject me, I sagged at the unfairness.

Marvin didn’t see it. Maybe a man who dealt in phantoms didn’t pay attention to the noisy human poltergeist in the room. He continued. “I’ll tell you something people find clarifying. If you bury yourself in the sand, give your negative thoughts to the earth, you can uncover yourself with a new perspective.”

“Sand? Like up to my neck?”

“You can lie flat. Wrap yourself in a sheet.”

“Well, we won’t have time for that,” Holly interrupted.

Marvin didn’t turn, but it was Holly he spoke to. “And that’s a shame because you could use some release work so that your inner sun can shine. Who are you mad at, Holly? Do you even know?”

Me, I wanted to say. She’s mad at me, and I’m terrified to know what I did because what if I deserved it and I can’t make it better? If I could have, I would have added, So I’m not going to address it.

Marvin glanced at me, as if he heard my thoughts. He slipped his card into my hand and said, “Talk to your inner deer. You’re going to need some help these next few days.” The thought of help had me thinking, What would that be like? To ask for help and have it come.

I turned to follow Holly and Summer out to the car, but I stopped and said to Marvin, out of earshot of the others, “My father. He’d berate me and then say, ‘Here’s your chance, Sammie. Say whatever you want to say to me.’ If I didn’t have ready words, he’d shout, ‘Speak!’ My mother would touch my shoulder to remind me that speaking just made things worse.”

Marvin, an empathetic pro, didn’t project easy sympathy. Instead he said, “It sucks to have to think of your mom’s loving coping as something you have to get over when it was your father who was the problem.”

I was raised by a father who, when presented with an antagonist, reared up and attacked. He didn’t smile or go silent like my mother did. He pushed back, intimidated, turned tables.

My father, in an uncharacteristic decision, had paid a contractor to lay a slate patio in our backyard. Day after day a haphazard crew my mother and I called the pirates showed up to do work. They arrived when their supervisor wasn’t present—told stories, smoked cigarettes, kicked around a paver or two, and went to lunch. It was like having a bunch of mutinous sailors in the dry backyard fooling around with the yardarm.

After a week, the patio almost complete, my mother joked at dinner that she was going to go out with limes so no one got scurvy.

Later that night I heard my father on the phone with the owner of the company. “It’s your business if you hire from Big Brothers of America, but the job had better be perfect.” My father slammed the door to his office, and I pitied the guy he was on the phone with.

Days later, I stood back from an open window, a sheer polka-dot curtain hiding me from view.

“Unacceptable. Shoddy. How are you going to fix this?” my father interrupted as the man tried to explain, ask a question, defend the work. “You’re a victim,” he shouted, his words plowing over the man’s attempts like a lawn mower killing a patch of my mother’s black-eyed Susans. My dad twisted the other man’s words around until the contractor’s jaw went white, his temple pulsing, and even as a fifteen-year-old girl, I knew it contained anger.

My dad shook his head and said, “You just don’t get it,” in that way he’d said it to me when I tried to tell him I didn’t want to take accounting or learn coding or how to play golf. That I was going to work with sick people, as a nurse maybe, and I didn’t need to make business deals on the golf course. He would grit his teeth, push over my words, and with bitter scorn say, “You just don’t get it, Samantha. You never do get it.” That would be enough to wind him up for an hour. One sentence spoken in my own defense, and it was an hour reprimand that started with the word idiot.

The contractor made the ultimate mistake when he said, “I’m sorry you are unhappy with our work.”

My dad looked at him square in the eye and said, “Sorry? What do I care? What does your apology do for me?”

My mother came behind me as I stood at the window watching. She put her lips to my ear and said, “No reason to watch your dad with that man outside. We have enough of that inside.”

She rubbed my back. “Why is he so hard, Mom?”

“His dad was hard on him. Just very exacting. Your dad is so much better than his dad.”

I gave my dad one more look. In that instant he saw me watching him bully that man. I froze. I tried to stay beneath his notice so as not to turn his wrath in my direction.

Instead of being embarrassed or feeling shame that his daughter was a witness to the manipulation going on just under her bedroom window, he gave me a sly grin like I was a coconspirator in his domination. Like I was his student in the art of bullying.

The contractor followed my father’s gaze and saw me. His anger changed to pity. The man who was being yelled at by my father felt sorry for me.

Later that night, after tossing and turning, trying to sleep, I threw up. I’d shut my window, and it was stuffy in the room. My mother, by my side, brushed my hair back and said, “Maybe it was something you ate?”

I heaved the fried chicken and cherry ice cream I’d eaten for dinner. My favorite foods made by my mother as an apology for a difficult father. He had regaled us at the table with his tough business dealings.

“You have to show who is in charge. You have to explain to people what they can’t see themselves.” He looked at me and said, “Not everyone is as smart as we are. People are laborers because they can’t do anything else.”

My best friend’s father had been a doctor in India but in Wisconsin was forced to work at the Oscar Mayer factory in maintenance. I thought about her kind dad, his dark skin, his soft hands that always had at least one black nail from getting it caught at the machine shop at work.

I gagged a final time into the toilet, watching the remnants of my dinner pool in the black circle at the bottom of the toilet; the yellow bile dribbled from my lower lip.

“There, there. Honey. Get it out. Let it all out.”

After my mother tucked me in, I said, “How do you handle him, Mom?”

She had her hand on my forehead, and instead of feeling cool and comfortable, it felt like a sticky weight. I shifted, and she removed it.

“I listen and go somewhere else in my head. I think about how kind he can be. I think about how much I love you. I fix his favorite meals. I count days.”

I remember wanting to ask what counting had to do with it.

“Roll over, honey. I’ll rub your back and blow on your neck.” She knew how much I loved a cool breeze on my neck. How much I wanted to sleep and shut out the hardness that lived both in the world and in our house. I pushed my face into my cool pillow, felt her lift my hair. A cool stream of air from her lips blew across the nape of my neck. I sighed.

I was on the verge of drifting off as I always did when I was comforted by my mom, but then my kitty cat of a mother whispered, “His dad died of a heart attack at fifty-one.”