There is a kind of customer who tells me what is wrong with the air conditioner before I have set my bag down. And then she tells me again, the same sentence, the same words, while I am opening the panel. And then a third time, while I am pulling the filter.

I used to think she was anxious. I used to think she did not trust me to listen. I do not think that anymore.

I went out to a house in Hennessey last summer. Brick ranch. The capacitor was pitted bad enough I could read the burn marks from three feet away. Easy fix. I had her cooling again in twenty minutes.

While I worked, she was talking from the back step, narrating to nobody in particular. About her mother. About a tree that came down in the ice storm. About how her brother always told her she was making things up. She was not talking to me. She was talking near me.

A psychologist named Jonice Webb wrote a book in 2012 about adults raised in households where the practical needs were met but the emotional ones were not. Nobody asked how they felt. Nobody made room for what was going on inside them. They grow up talking near people, not to them, because they stopped expecting to be heard a long time ago.

When I finished the ticket, I sat on the porch and asked her to tell me about the tree. She told me the whole story. Said she had not told anyone the whole thing. She was fifty-five.

Core line: "She was not talking to me. She was talking near me."

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