Page 20 of Soft Flannel Hank

The memory of Esther with her naked thighs spread over his own surfaced. How she’d looked at him and responded,“I just met this great guy and he’s been really sweet and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t call him a loser.”He’d been speechless, unable to refute it, even if he hadn’t believed it.

And then Mrs. Kim had told him he was a good man this morning. Hank knew he wasn’t a bad man, but that was a far cry from being a good one.

“I guess almost always.”

“Do you ever feel like you’re not good enough?”

“For what?”

“Just… good enough.”

He squeezed his eyes shut, rubbed his palms over his denim-covered thighs.

“I almost always feel like that.”

Nadja made a sympathetic noise in her throat. Hank heard the scratch of her ballpoint pen against the legal pad. He kept his eyes closed, his head dropped back, his hands rubbing.

“When you look in the mirror, do you like what you see?”

For a long time, he’d avoided looking in the mirror at all costs. But last night, he had, and he’d liked what he saw. Or, at least, he liked what he saw happening. The spark in his eyes. Determination on his face. He’d liked that a lot.

“Almost never.”

“Do you ever apologize for things that aren’t your fault?”

It was on the tip of his tongue to say that at least he never did that. But then the last seventeen years flashed through his mind in a blink. Him apologizing to Marnie over and over during their relationship, and then him apologizing for it ending. Over and over and over again. As if it was all his fault, as if he was the only participant in the marriage, the only one to drive it off the cliff.

“I do that,” he said quietly.

Nadja shifted in her chair. She picked up her coffee, took a sip, put it back down. Scratched something out on the legal pad. The sounds felt amplified in the intense quiet of her office

“Hank, can I tell you what I think?”

He grunted.

“I think that your self-esteem is in the shitter.”

A sudden laugh bursting from his lips. He knew it was in the shitter. Hell, people who had never met him could tell from fifty yards away that his self-esteem was dead as could be.

But that didn’t mean he was ready for Nadja to do an autopsy on it. Not yet.

“I’m going to give you some homework. I’d like you to do it every night for the next week until our next session.”

“Homework?” he asked.

“I want you to get a notebook and every night, I want you to answer these four questions,” she said, writing quickly before tearing off a sheet of lined paper and handing it to him across the coffee table.

What went well today?

What did I learn today?

What did I enjoy about today?

What do I want to feel tomorrow?

“Don’t overthink it,” she said.

Unlikely, Hank thought, but he nodded anyway, and Nadja smiled.