At fifty, she could pass for forty. At five eleven, she easily gave the impression of being several inches taller, and most who met her would have thought her six foot three or six foot four, even when she wore flats. She was lean, triathlete lean, and often dressed to accentuate her slender legs and long torso.
Plus, when male colleagues would be around, she often wore three-inch pumps with chunky heels.
But at work, Hailey was all business. For the past two years, since she arrived from points south, she had become the top therapist for male veterans in the entire capital area. Her evaluations were always higher than all of her colleagues, across the various facilities the Veteran's Administration maintained for their patients. And her results, buried in the databases of the government and the healthcare bureaucracies, showed that, among the tens of thousands of veterans seeking counseling services in the area, Hailey's clients achieved, on average, more positive outcomes and more frequent positive outcomes than other patients receiving treatment from other therapists in the system.
Hailey had counseled and therapized many clients over her decade in social work, but the client populations in the capital area were a natural fit for her natural skills.
From her military bearing, her military posture, her military formality and utterly neutral affect during most of her therapeutic talk and counseling sessions, many of her clients inquired if Hailed had served.
"I was raised by a Veteran," Hailey would reply. "My father was Army," but that's all she would say.
From the neutral tones of her clothes, the simplicity of her short hair cut, and the uniform of pants and breast-minimizing-and-hiding tops Hailey wore interchangeably to work each day, her clients wondered to themselves about her sexual preferences.
Hailey worked hard to drain all sexuality from her office, from her counseling room for group sessions, from all of the counseling and discussion and analysis she provided her clients.
She lived alone in a simple house on the exurban edge of the metroplex sprawl. Her adult children, pursuing their post-graduate educations, were busy in their own lives, and although they texted daily, they seldom visited, giving Hailey plenty of time for herself.
She knew that moving up to the capital area would provide her with the hunting she was looking for. With a population large enough and discreet enough, so that Hailey could finally realize the fantasies she had held on to throughout decades past; from long before meetings, and sobriety, and children and love and loss.
Most Friday nights, she'd leave the clinic, buy a pack of Newports at a gas station near the highway, then drive slow through the commuter traffic, window down low enough for her cigarette's plume, until she crossed the arbitrary boundary between her consortium of Veteran's Admin medical centers, into where the next territory began.
No passport needed, no papers to be shown, and Hailey was in a world beyond the restraints of her workweek.
It was as if her sensible Subaru drove itself the rest of the way. The highway to a state road, then the first exit, then two traffic lights and then she had reached her destination. There was a Narcotics Anonymous meeting at eight that led to a nine-thirty Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, both in the same storefront church in a dying exurban shopping mall.
Hailey pulled into a spot in the back, away from the rest of the cars. The digital clock on her dashboard read 7:53.
The community around the mall where the meetings were had prospered in the last decade, settled by veterans participating in the more lucrative post-service careers within the military industrial complex, and the Friday meetings had a regular group of old drunks with thirty-plus year chips, and a reliable set of mostly heroin survivors at the opening narc-anon meeting. Hailey knew which ones were long-divorced or never-married and stable, which ones to shake hands with and then avoid, which ones to not shake hands with and avoid, and which ones were married but had the skills to handle a tasty temptation in the form of a woman twenty years younger who had enthusiasm their wives did not have anymore, who could handle the tricky test of their sobriety that Hailed would present for them, after a meeting in the shadows of the parking lot on a Friday night.
