“Like getting on a bus bound for Boston in the dead of winter with no shoes, no jacket, and no money, save bus fare?” Ava said lightly, crossing her legs. “When I came out of that blackout, it took me half an hour to figure out where I was, how I’d gotten there. Some helpful soul had seen me wandering around and got me to a soup kitchen. By the time I called your grandfather, he was frantic; he’d already put out a missing person’s report.” She shuddered again, thinking of that awful day. She’d been physically unable to make herself look her husband in the eye when he came by to pick her up. “The scary thing is, that wasn’t even my bottom. It took a couple more adventures like that to set me straight.”
Brandon caught the end of that story as he was passing out the drinks: two cups of black coffee and one cup with enough milk and sugar to make it almost a milk shake.
“I hear you.” He pulled up his shirt. On his chest was a picture of a lion tearing through his flesh. “On my back, I’ve got his rear end. I came to about an hour after this ugly thing was finished.” He woefully pulled his shirt back down. “That was my bottom.”
“It’s not bad, as far as tattoos go.” Ava tried to console him. “It’s actually quite well drawn. It’s just, well, it’s . . .”
“It’s sooooo not you,” Molly declared firmly.
“That’s it exactly,” Brandon concurred. “Sitting in a tattoo parlor getting a tattoo that I think will make me more ‘butch’ while loaded out of my mind—definitely not me.”
The chattering and squeaking of wooden chairs suddenly ceased as a man in his late fifties ambled over to the podium. He wore a plaid shirt, worn jeans, and a cell phone peeking out of his front shirt pocket, the plastic-coated kind that you could take outside in all kinds of weather. He looked vaguely familiar to Ava.
“Hello, everyone, I’m Sean.” His dark hair was sprinkled with grey, and he had the easy speaking quality of someone who’d been around awhile, who’d earned a dogged respect—and who had the battle scars to show how he’d found his way to the doorstep.
“Hello, Sean.” Ava and Brandon greeted him along with the rest of the group, and Molly chimed in at the end, feeling a bit embarrassed. Brandon squeezed her shoulders. “It’s always tough for virgins,” he whispered, and she bit back a giggle.
“Well, they tell me it’s my turn to get up and say something since I didn’t bring the doughnuts this time,” Sean continued, and everyone laughed.
Ava whispered, “He’s got a landscaping business. He’s also divorced. Three-time loser, as he says—four kids, all grown and gone.”
“I never met a beer that I wasn’t best friends with . . . But I was in love with the one I was gonna have after it,” Sean said with conviction, and a wave of been-there laughter ran through the room. “Most of my waking hours, I was walking around in a booze-soaked fog, but I got away with it for years. I was in control of it because I was the king of the ‘yets’ for a long time. I never got a DUI. Never spent a night in jail. Never cheated on a woman. Never missed work because of my drinking and my drugging. Never let a good friend down, never told a lie, never stole any money. Then the nevers . . . Well, any drunk knows ‘never’ means ‘not yet.’” He counted off on his fingers. “A few years rolling around in the gutter, and then I got a call from my ex-wife Margie. I don’t even know how the hell she’d managed to track me down, but track me down she did. She’d been to the doctor, and he’d told her that her breast cancer had spread to her lymph nodes. In other words, she was gonna die. I didn’t even know she’d been sick.” He stopped again, clenching both sides of the podium so hard his knuckles turned white.
The room fell completely silent. Some people bowed their heads, some nodded, but all understood.
“She didn’t have any family, and my folks she didn’t trust a damn. So, when she died, that meant our boys would grow up in foster care. Now, I’m sure it’s come a long way since I was growing up, but, well . . .” He rocked in his boots a bit, trying to think of an inoffensive way to put it, in case any social workers were in the group. “Lord, it’s such a bitch being so PC all the time!” he groaned, getting another huge laugh. “Sorry to generalize, but let’s just say, in my day, nothing very good happened to boys in foster care. If you didn’t get worked to the bone, you got molested, or worse. Pretty much the best you could hope for was some little old lady that would ignore you and pocket your check every month.”
The thought of two little boys with no homes still made tears well up in Molly’s eyes. Brandon put his arm around her comfortingly, draping it over the back of the wooden folding chair.
“Margie told me that her boys were not, repeat, not going to end up on the State,” Sean went on, “and, unfortunately—that’s just the word she used—I was the only chance of keeping them together and making sure they were cared for. So,” he said, smiling, “she laid it all out for me. I was going to get sober. I was going to reinstate my business. I was going to fix my credit and make sure my boys had enough money to get to college. I was going to be a good and attentive father, and if I couldn’t figure out how, then I’d have to marry someone desperate enough to marry me who could do it in my stead.”
Another wave of laughter rippled through the room, but Molly understood it better now. Laugh at all the jokes, even the little ones, because the tension here builds so fast that any release at all is needed.
“She told me flat-out that this was going to be the way it was, and from her tone, I gotta tell you, I didn’t even think about saying no.” He drew a deep breath, gave a broad, easy grin, and shrugged, as if to say, What are you gonna do? “She got me to rehab and got me all detoxed, and also got me my twenty-eight days, you know, the full month that we used to get before the HMOs fucked it up for us the way they have everything else.”
There was a lot of mutual groaning about that one.
“Now rehabs generally last four or five hours a day,” Brandon whispered. “They’ll cover it, as it’s preventative, but this way they don’t have to feed you or give you a bed. A lot less people make it than with the twenty-eight full days.”
“Cheap-assed bastards,” Ava chimed in, and the room agreed. Molly giggled. She always got a kick out of it when Grandma swore.
“Then I was back home,” Sean continued. “Back home, and going to four, maybe five meetings a day. Not a week,” he stressed to their disbelieving faces, “a day. And for the first two months I was home, on weekends we just drove from one meeting to another. I’d go inside, and she’d find a playground for the boys to play at while I was in the halls. It was a crazy schedule, but it worked. She watched me like a hawk; she’d even follow me into the bathroom for a time, and let me tell you, no one wants to be close to me for that.” All the men in the hall whooped at that, while the women made faces. “After three months, she let me down to three a day, then after three months of that, two a day. All the while, she was getting skinnier and skinnier.” He paused to take his handkerchief out of his jeans pocket. “But she stayed tough as nails on me, no matter how frail she looked on the outside. I called up a couple of my clients, told them I was sober now and trying to stay on the straight and narrow. Mostly, I called to apologize, especially to Dolby—that’s the guy I hit. But, you’ll never believe it.” He looked openly around the room, still surprised by their reaction. “Once they’d heard I was in the program and had been sober for four months, you know what they did? Some of them, they, well, they immediately offered me some work. I didn’t have my equipment anymore, but I asked around and borrowed a riding lawn mower, a weed whacker, and Margie went right out and bought new hedge clippers and pruning shears with what little credit she had left on her Visa. Word about me spread, and my phone started ringing.” He reached up and unashamedly wiped his eyes. “Before I knew what hit me, I’d been sober a whole year. Not only had I made a down payment on a new truck and some new equipment, I’d read every book on parenting that Margie could carry home from the library, every single word Dr. Spock, Joyce Brothers, and Dr.
Phil ever wrote down, and after a bit, my boys actually lit up when they came home from school and saw me there. They’d look over at me in the stands at their Little League games, like they couldn’t quite believe I was there . . . And then they’d look anxiously back, like they were sure I’d take off any second. After two, three years, they stopped looking surprised that I was there and started complaining I was in their faces too much.” He smiled right through the tears now.
“By then, Margie was near the end, and no matter how long I’d been sober, no matter how well I was doing, every night she would make me promise her that I wouldn’t become that guy again. That guy ruined her credit, ignored our sons, broke her heart. And every day I’d promise. I’d say, ‘No, honey, that guy is gone, and he’s gone for good.’ One day, right after she made me promise, she closed her eyes, and then . . .” He pinched the bridge of his nose, pushing back the sobs. “Then she just . . . She just wasn’t there anymore. I could see it happening.” He bent his head again for a moment, then looked up and smiled, this time a little weakly. “Part of me thinks she hung on as long as she did just to make sure I was really gonna do it, that I was gonna take my life back, the one that she’d forced me to resuscitate from the dead. And I gotta tell you,” he admitted, “I didn’t want any part of sobering up, at first. Especially when the shakes set in, or I couldn’t stop throwing up, or I couldn’t sleep. But I did it for Margie. Because she told me I had to, and because, even through the haze, I still knew I loved her more than I’d ever loved anything, and what’s more, I was stunned that she’d take on the not-small task of sobering up a slobbering drunk like me, just to protect our boys. But she saw that as the only option. So when she set out to do it, nothing was gonna stop her.” He was quiet for a minute.
Molly could hear the traffic outside on Congress Street, crossing onto Islington. Then Sean continued, “They say you can’t get sober for someone else. It won’t work. It’s gotta be for you. Well, I’m here to tell you, that’s not true. I got sober for Margie and my boys, all those years ago, and it did work, because in the end, it was all for me anyway. No matter what I was able to give Margie toward the end, or to my boys, it all meant I got my life back. And when I got my life back, and realized it was a damn tough thing to do, well, I started doing something I hadn’t done since I could remember.” He paused just long enough to make sure that he had everyone’s full attention. “I started to respect myself. And as long as I, as we all,” he gestured to all of them in the small, dusty, room, “respect ourselves for all we’ve done, it makes it a hell of a lot harder to even consider picking up again. One drink,” he intoned darkly, “and for me, it’s all over. I respect myself too much to go back to being that guy. But I did lie to her about one thing; that guy could come back at any moment. If I stop working the program, that guy is right here. And I never want to see that guy again . . . so I hope you all don’t mind seeing me as often as I can get here.”
There was a round of applause as he finished up, and he waved it off, then took a small, jovial bow. People stood, wiped their eyes, stretched, reached for their cigarettes and empty cups, and began mingling.
“Break time.” Ava yawned and stretched a little. “My, my, some of the speakers do run on a little.”
Glancing at her watch, Molly was surprised to see that Sean had spoken for half an hour. She could have listened to his hypnotic voice all day.
“You were never that bad, Grandma,” she felt compelled to say.
“Look for the similarities, not the differences.” Brandon and Ava spoke in unison and then looked at each other, laughing.
“Jinx,” said Brandon affectionately, “you owe me a Coke.”
“You two rehearsed that,” Molly accused, as they stood to refill their Styrofoam cups with more weak coffee.
“You’ll learn the lingo if you’re around it enough. Through osmosis,” Ava told her. “It’s our mantra. And when we need it, it helps.”
Molly’d had a few drunken nights in her life, but they were few and far between. It had taken a lot of hard work, after all, to get that scholarship to Vassar. But it was a hereditary thing, everyone said. Did that mean that there was a real possibility that one day she’d be here, right next to these people, saying these words? She shook her head. That’s tomorrow’s problem, as her grandfather would have said. Best spend today looking out for today.
Sean walked by them then, looking for a place to sit in the crowd. He smiled briefly at Ava, a bright, engaging smile that closed off quickly once it had done its job. Ava suddenly realized where she knew him from.
“My goodness, that’s Sean . . . oh, what was his last name again? Williams, that’s it.”
Molly suddenly turned to Ava. “He’s got a landscaping business,” Molly intoned. “He’s also divorced, three-time loser—and yes, Brandon, I know that means he’s been to rehab three times, see how in the loop I am?—and, as he says, four kids, all grown and gone.” She leaned forward and whispered, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“I can’t imagine what you’re thinking,” Ava said breezily, “but I’m going to go invite our new friend Sean for a cookout next Monday night.”
FIFTEEN
“Oh . . . my . . . God!!” Suzanne repeated about five or six times until the realization began to sink in. So many little details . . . So many comments . . . So many years. It all started to snap into place with almost audible clicks.
“Will you keep your voice down?” Buddy threw a worried glance down the block. “Even if they’re on the bus by now, that woman still has ears like a bat.”
“Okay, okay, okay.” Suzanne grabbed for her trusty Spirits and tried to compose herself, her hand shaking as she touched the lighter’s flame to the tip of the cigarette. “Okay, Buddy, you sit. Oh . . . you’re already sitting. Okay, I’ll sit. Now that I’m sitting, you talk.”
“It’s a long story, sweetie, maybe we can just leave it at . . .” he began weakly, but one look from Suzanne’s face convinced him of the futility of the argument. “Okay. Fine.” He drew a deep breath and started again. “Your mom must have told you how she and your dad met.”
“Probably,” she shrugged. “But I gotta tell you, any story that had to do with her and sex with Daddy . . . Frankly, I just tune her out like a radio.”
“It was after our tour of duty,” Buddy began. “We were home on leave. It felt good to be home, but scary too. Everything had changed, everyone had changed, and who knew if we’d see anyone ever again? You tried not to think that way, but you did.”
Suzanne nodded. She couldn’t imagine having to go through that herself and knocked on wood that her only child was a girl so she’d never get drafted either—although that might change by the time she had grandchildren. If she ever had grandchildren. Come to think of it, she wasn’t quite sure how that worked.
“There was this big USO Christmas dance at the Rochester Recreation Center,” Buddy was saying. “One minute, we’re facedown in the mud, covered all the time in blood, brains, and guts, killing men and screwing every whore we could find.” He laughed ironically. “But you put us in a rec hall that we’d been in a thousand times, with a basketball hoop, some colored lights, and a bunch of clean-cut American girls in skirts and sweater sets—all of a sudden, you’d think we didn’t know how to talk. We’d stare down at our feet, kicking at our shoes, drinking cup after cup of soda.” He reached underneath the chair and pulled out his macramé basket. In addition to helping with his arthritis, he noticed, it did wonders for calming the nerves. “Your dad was worse off than I was.”
“Daddy was shy?” Suzanne’s mouth dropped open, letting herself fall back against the iron bench; that didn’t fit with any picture of her dad she had in her mind. “Mr. Giggles and Gin, shy?”
“After half an hour or so, I look up, and there’s this girl.” Buddy spoke the word softly, tenderly, almost as though it were a kiss. He was really warming up to the story now—his eyes were starting to gleam, and there was more color i
n his face than she’d seen in a long time, since all those years back on State Street in the pub. “This tall, auburn-haired girl with big dark eyes and hair done up all fancy; her headband matched her sweater.” He met her eyes and touched his hand to his chest. “I was just a sucker for that. She was wearing a strand of pearls her father had gotten her for graduating high school.”
“A strand of pearls?” She shot a betrayed look at her mother’s house. “All I got was a stinkin’ typewriter.”
“I think the balance of your graduation present was spent on baby clothes,” Buddy reminded her, and Suzanne ducked her head, properly chastised. “So, I couldn’t take my eyes off this girl. She was a knockout. Neither could Jimmy. And not just her face, her body, but she had this, this energy that radiated from her in waves. You couldn’t be in a room with this woman and not notice her. Anyway, we’re both standing there like a couple of dorks, downing cup after cup of soda, trying to egg each other into making the first move, when,” he held up a finger to draw out the suspense, “what do you think? The girl comes over herself and starts talking away.”
“Yeah, so?” It was something Suzanne had done a hundred times or more at dances in high school. Well, until senior year, at least, when her belly started sticking out.
“You gotta understand,” Buddy smiled a little, “this was before the women’s lib movement. And Portsmouth was always a little behind the times anyway. Some would have called her a floozy just for doing that. But not me. Frankly, it turned me on to no end. Since she was so brave, it was easy for me to be brave, so pretty soon I asked her to dance, and she said yes. Now, Jimmy never worked up the nerve, and he’d had his chance, so I didn’t feel too badly, at first . . . If Jimmy really wanted something, he went for it. I figured this was his way of throwing me a signal. Boy, did I misread that one. Anyway, for the rest of the night, I danced with her. She smelled like . . . like lilies of the valley.” He closed his eyes and inhaled; sometimes that was enough to bring the scent back.
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