Chapter two

Support Group

Jane Wallace loved early mornings. Her cell was silent.  No colleagues whining.  No clients hounding her for results.  It was the time of day that belonged only to her.  Her sacred routine was as important to her as oxygen.  Coffee in bed watching Morning Joe and ereading the New York Times.  The local newspaper, delivered daily, would be read later at the office.  Jane needed this routine.  Her family and colleagues did yoga or ran in the mornings or listened to loud music to get going.  Not Jane.  Slow and easy starts to the day set her in just the right frame of mind. 

            Jane was almost always first to the office, which wasn’t saying much as her office and living space were under the same roof.   Jane’s office and home occupied one of the many four square homes still standing in the historic Fairmount neighborhood of Fort Worth.  She loved her neighborhood and her 103-year-old house.  They were growing old together, gracefully even.  It had been decades since anyone had called Jane “cute.”  She had never been a beauty, but she wasn’t unattractive either.  In the old days she was petite.  Today she was just plain short, 5-feet-2 inches, with a little extra around the middle.  Jane was perfectly fine with how she looked.  Aging had a liberating effect on how she viewed her body.  Once critical of lumps and sagging parts, she now was just plain grateful all the parts still worked.  At age 59, Jane told herself she had earned every wrinkle on her face and every gray hair on her head.  Besides, nobody was looking at her anymore and that worked to her advantage.  In her line of work she needed to blend into a crowd, and that's what middle-aged and older women do; they go unnoticed.       
          Until 5 years ago, Jane was a social worker with the city’s mental health agency that served the poor.  She was hired at the agency out of college as a counselor, meeting clients in their homes, monitoring their progress and making sure they stayed on their meds.  Family and friends used to worry about her, but eventually stopped asking, “Aren’t you scared to go into their homes?”  They got tired of Jane lecturing them to stop stigmatizing mental illness:  “They aren’t monsters, they are mentally ill. Would you say the same thing if my clients had cancer?  They don’t choose to have an illness.”  Jane loved her clients and she loved her work.  When she left the agency after 30 years of service, she was one of its top administrators, grants administration vice president.   She figured it was time to let one of her younger colleagues take over.  Jane wasn't ageist about the decision, it simply was the right thing for the agency.
          Jane was never good at sitting still too long.  It took a whole week of retirement before she started her own company. She had been thinking about what she wanted to do for some time, so she wasn’t entirely unprepared.  Jane had wanted to be a private investigator; like in the books she so loved to read.  She was tenacious about finding resources and she didn’t give up until she found something.  More important, she was good at assessing people and situations.  Thirty years in the mental health field had toned her skills in observation.  So, why not, Jane wondered?  She had enough to live on, so she didn’t really need to make much or anything, really.  With her personal and professional contacts, Jane figured she could find work.  She knew she wasn’t getting any younger, so forward she pushed; filing paperwork for a company she named Support Group, or SG.  She described the company in vague terms on purpose – “service provider for individuals and businesses.”  She reasoned that should cover just about everything. 
          Family and friends knew better than to question her mental health although Jane knew they thought she was nuts, and there were times early on that she agreed.  Doubts were soon buried after a couple of lawyer friends hired Jane to do some minor civil and criminal investigations.  That led to an individual hiring Jane to document a cheating spouse.  Jane went the extra mile for her client and was able to talk the cheat into admitting where he hid missing assets.  Jane was not beneath summoning her inner little old lady to take down slime.  The business really took off after one of her cases made national news.  A four-year-old child kidnapped 23 years earlier had been living three hours away in Oklahoma City.  Jane’s cell and email blew up with requests to find similar lost loved ones.  SG was up and running, just like many of the people she was hired to find.   
            Jane’s relished in the success of SG.  Her only wish: she could have shared it with her husband, David.