Scent of Roses

Elizabeth Conners sat behind her desk at the Family Psychology Clinic. The office was comfortably furnished, with an oak desk and chair, a couple of four-drawer oak file cabinets, two oak side chairs and a sofa upholstered in dark green fabric sitting against one wall.Oak-framed pictures of the town in the early nineteen hundreds decorated the interior and a green-glass lamp sat on the edge of her desk, giving the place a casual, old-fashioned appearance. The office was neat and orderly. With the number of cases she handled, it was imperative she be well organized.Elizabeth glanced at the stack of manila files on her desk, each one a case she was currently working. For the past two years, she had been an employee of the small, privately owned clinic in San Pico, California. Elizabeth had been born in the town, mainly an agricultural community, situated near the southwest end of the San Joaquin Valley.She had graduated from San Pico High, then gotten a partial scholarship to help pay her way through college. She had majored in psychology at UCLA, earning a master's in social work, making extra money with a part-time job as a waitress, as she had done in high school.Two years ago, she had returned to her hometown, a quiet place of refuge where her father and sister lived, though her dad had died last year and her sister had married and moved away. Elizabeth had come to recover from a messy divorce, and the quiet life away from the city had helped bring her out of the depression she had suffered after her marriage to Brian Logan had fallen apart.In contrast to the hustle of busy Santa Ana, where she had been working, San Pico was a city of around thirty thousand people, of which half the population was now Hispanic. Elizabeth's family had been among the original founders back in 1907, farmers and dairymen back then. During her childhood, her father and mother had owned a small neighborhood market, Conner's Grocery, but after her mother had died, her father had sold the business and retired, and Elizabeth had gone off to school.She reached for the file on top of the stack on her desk, preparing herself for her upcoming session that evening with the Mendoza family, conducted in their home. The file contained a history of drinking and family violence that included an incident of child abuse, but the violence seemed to have lessened in the months the family had been in counseling.Elizabeth fervently believed the sessions were helping family members learn to deal with each other in ways that did not include physical violence.Leaning over the file, she tucked an annoying strand of dark auburn hair behind an ear and continued to scan the file. Like all of the Conners, she was dark-haired, slenderly built and a little taller than average. But unlike her sister, she had been blessed with the clear blue eyes of her mother.Which meant that every time she looked in the mirror, she thought of Grace Conners and missed her.Her mother had died a painful death from cancer when Elizabeth was just fifteen. They had been extremely close and the difficult months of caring for, then losing her had taken its toll. Elizabeth's blue eyes were her mother's legacy, but the memories they stirred were so painful that sometimes, instead of a blessing, her best feature seemed more of a curse.Elizabeth sighed as she reached the end of the report, closed the file and leaned back in her chair. She had never expected to return to her hometown, which was flat and dusty and most of the year far too hot.But sometimes fate had different notions and here she was, in a rented apartment on Cherry Street, doing the kind of work she had been trained for, and though she didn't particularly like living in the homely little town, at least she felt good about her job.She was thinking about her upcoming session that night when a soft knock sounded at the door. She looked up to see one of the boys she counseled walk into the room. Raul PereMartin, Kat is the author of 'Scent of Roses', published 2006 under ISBN 9780778323266 and ISBN 0778323269.