by Andrew Post
Amber got behind the podium, leaned her cane against the wall, and looked out at the fifteen faces, strangers every one of them. But she could see it in their eyes as they sat and waited for her to begin that they’d been here before, done this same initial introduction, and that made it feel better. She wasn’t the first. It was just the first time for her.
“My name is Stella Artois and I’m an alcoholic. Sorry. You guys have probably heard that one before. I just thought because of the whole anonymous part, it might be funny to…ahem, let me try that again. My name is Amber and I’m.…”
Her jaw clenched closed on the rest of that declaration. She looked out toward the back of the room where Jolene, with the same titanium carbon fiber leg peeking out at the cuff of her jeans, stood. Her friend smiled, encouragingly, and rolled her hand on her wrist and mouthed, You got this.
Amber cleared her throat. “My name is Amber and I’m an alcoholic.”
All together: “Welcome, Amber.”
“Thanks. So, I guess I’ll just jump right in. I brought notes. I’m lucky to be alive today. I don’t know how many of you remember last summer. But I was there during what the news ended up calling the Summer of Blood. I wasn’t there for the first massacre, but I sure as hell was for the second. For a while I blamed everyone but myself for what happened to me. I didn’t think it was my fault. But, as my friend helped me realize, I only had myself to thank for winding up in that situation, one where I ended up paying the price by losing part of myself – literally. And I got there because of many factors. I was greedy. I didn’t want to work a regular job. I wanted to cut corners and cheat and steal to get ahead.” She stopped reading her index cards. “And when the day was through of lying and cheating and taking advantage of my best friend’s patience and loving heart, I drank myself into oblivion to try and numb myself from facing who I was rapidly becoming. It took having a piece of my body cut off to realize I was clearly heading down a bad road. Now, I’m being sued by two different families because the funeral home I used to own – before the bank took it back – the power got turned off and both of their loved ones ended up rotting in my basement and.…”
Jolene, in the back, wasn’t smiling encouragingly anymore but swiping a flat hand across her throat again and again, eyes wide behind her glasses.
“So much for being anonymous,” Amber said, and it got a small chuckle from a few people. Most of them were staring at her, frowning, confused, looking sickened. “Anyway, I’m lucky to be alive. Even if it means having to work off two impending lawsuits and court costs and whatever my lawyer ends up costing me, I’m alive. I have my best friend. I nearly lost her. A bunch of times in the past few years, and again just recently. She’s given up so much for me. Countless hours of her life worrying about me, trying to help save me and my business that ended up going under anyway – because of me. So much. So, so much. And more, which I’m sure she probably doesn’t want me to discuss.”
Jolene in the back was shaking her head.
“Anyway, I just want to say if you have people in your life who have stuck with you as you tried to make yourself better, or helped you see you needed to make that change, you owe them everything. My friend never gave up on me. My sister, I like to call her, because she is my sister.” Amber thrust a finger over the podium toward Jolene in the back, who immediately tried to shrink herself, face reddening. “Her name is Jolene – or, you know, Jane Doe since this is AA which I’m not sure extends to friends of drunks – but I love her. I love you, Jo-Jo.”
Jolene smiled. “I love you too.”
“That’s it. I’m done. My name’s Amber and I am an alcoholic.”
* * *
Stepping outside, Jolene and Amber donned sunglasses and sparked up cigarettes, passing the pack of smokes and a lighter back and forth until each had what they needed. They moved on down the street, shoes crunching over the thin layer of snow covering the sidewalk.
Inside the prosthetic’s soft rubber socket holding her stump, it still ached. Jolene was getting used to the weird pressure she felt when it rained and the imbalance and asymmetry her body would have forever. And worst of all, the sense of loss came at her anew each time her missing leg itched and, forgetting, she reached down to scratch and only brushed her fingernails against cold metal. It was easy to forget it was gone in the morning, when warm in bed in her new apartment. Where she lived alone, and missed sharing a kitchen table with somebody or having someone to talk to first thing about what the day had in store. She wasn’t as busy anymore. She didn’t wear black to work. She didn’t arrange flowers or set up a casket elevator or try talking people up into Egyptian silk linings or platinum handles or cherry over oak because it shined nicer. She didn’t spend more time with the dead than the living anymore.
Jolene and Amber came to the bus stop and both stepped inside the fiberglass enclosure. The ad for swimwear next to them had been marked over to put devil horns on the busty model’s perfect head.
It wasn’t so cold today. In Minnesota you learn, real quick, what’s tolerably cold and what kind of cold can kill you. But today it wasn’t windy and the snow wasn’t falling and the sky, full of dark clouds, was even kind of nice – the occasional sunbeam cut through and found things to spotlight below, briefly. Even in the bus stop where they sat, an occasional drifting ray of warmth on their faces as they both angled their chins up, eyes closed, and savored it. They savored a lot of things now, noticed small stuff more often. Nearly dying can do that. It was coming to them automatically but Jolene, who had to undergo an evaluation following her two months in the hospital, had gotten a few good lessons on appreciating what she had from her new doctor. They didn’t see any need to put her on pills and figured being done with her old life would probably help to automatically adjust her attitude. Her doctor recommended not seeing Amber anymore. And Jolene said in reply that she wouldn’t be coming in anymore, and left. Only she could say what she needed – and she was ready to speak up and ask for it, no matter the situation. Life was too short. She’d seen a possible end reaching up to grab her, to steal her down into nothingness. It could come any time. And she was surprised she hadn’t realized that sooner, given she’d helped bury hundreds of people. But sometimes things can stare you right in the face for years, and never be seen.
“Thanks for coming and being moral support today,” Amber said, snapping Jolene back to the present. In the bus stop enclosure, in the not-so-bad cold, right here, right now. “I really appreciate it, Jo-Jo. I would’ve been pissing my pants up there without you.”
“You always did hate public speaking.”
“And yet that’s all we’ve been having to do at the trials.”
“Yeah, well, that sort of comes with the territory. Are you worried?”
Amber sighed, a little white ghost of her breath. “I was at first but whatever happens happens, I guess. Do they know about it at work, you having to go to the courthouse so often?”
“My boss does but everyone else, I think, is under the assumption I’m going to physical therapy for the leg.”
They were quiet awhile. The buses, because of road conditions, had been running late.
“So, what’re you up to this afternoon, little lady?” Amber said.
“Well, I’ve got to go grocery shopping, then after I drop that off at the apartment, I have the closing shift at work.” Jolene noticed Amber was using her knee as a desk to fill out an application. “I could put in a good word for you with my boss, if you want.”
“Thanks, but I have a good feeling about this one. Kiss it.” Amber held the finished job application out to Jolene.
Jolene kissed it. “Good luck. Did I see that’s for a pet store?”
“Yeah. The one downtown.”
“I can picture you working there. Might make a good fit.”
“Are you liking the bookstore?”
Jolene nodded. “I am. A
lot. I wish you’d come in and see me more, though.”
“Minute I have something full-time and I know my schedule, consider me there, every lunch break you have.”
They were quiet awhile again.
“Still think about the money?” Amber said. It had been the first thing they’d done once the doctors and physical therapists had said they could leave, that their injuries were now healed enough and chance of infection was low. They bit their nails the entire cab ride out to that part of town. It took days of calling junkyards and scrap places to see if a wrecked hearse had come in, passing the hospital room’s phone back and forth as the other scoured the White Pages. And when they finally got a hit, they begged and pleaded to the ether hoping the paper bag of money would still be there – a lawyer had come to inform them he was representing not one but two families, the Tamblyns and the Wicks, in a lawsuit against the Hawthorne Funeral Home for criminal negligence. But arriving in the junkyard and walking around the leaning piles of dead, rusty cars all crushed flat, tires level with their roofs, and they finally found the hearse, it took two hours of prying with crowbars to get the back hatch to open far enough for Amber to slide a hand inside. She drew out only scraps of brown paper bag, no money. Not even a single dollar. Neither said a word as they returned to the waiting cab. Now, in the bus stop enclosure, that felt a lot longer than four months ago. And in all the commotion, to add insult to injury, they’d missed Slug’s funeral.
“Once in a while,” Jolene finally said. “I think it worked out like it was supposed to.”
“What about Frank?”
The news of his suicide didn’t make national news, but the local papers ran every single detail they could squeeze out of his life, looking to fill the minutes with whatever they could dig up. There wasn’t much. He had no online presence. The paragraph in the obituaries summed everything up pretty nicely.
“I thank him every night before I go to sleep,” Jolene said.
Amber nodded. “Me too.” She ran a gloved hand over her knee, down to where her skin under the jeans ended, and metal began.
For a third time they said nothing. They sat watching the traffic collect at the intersection, then watched it move away when the light changed, and collect again. They heard, with the next approaching mass of vehicles, the grumble of a city bus. They helped one another stand, and waited at the opening of the enclosure, squinting into the cold wind and drifting flakes falling through the leafless trees.
“I think that’s yours. Uptown, right?” Amber said.
“Yeah, that’s me.”
The bus sidled up to the curb and its doors hissed open.
“Guess I’ll see you when I see you.”
“Call me tonight,” Jolene said. “Tell me how it went.”
“How dropping off an application went? I don’t have an interview yet, Jo.”
“I know. But I want to hear about it anyway.”
“Okay, weirdo. I’ll call you tonight to describe dropping off my application if it’s so important to you.”
“It is important.” Everything, to Jolene Morris, was important now. She didn’t want to have a single detail, at all, go unnoticed ever again.
They hugged. The bus driver was patient as Jolene struggled up the bus steps. Amber waved goodbye as they pulled off. Jolene waved too, even for a little while after she couldn’t see her friend anymore.
Jolene watched the city move past her. People bundled up walking on the sidewalks. People scraping ice from their windshields. Other drivers in their cars, trying to get somewhere. No one was lying still, no one was on a slab, all of them were still trying to be places, see people, do things, fall in love, work hard enough to go on long trips, have kids, take their dogs for a walk, buy a house, cook dinner for the people they love. Jolene had forgotten about all this life out here, having spent so many hours in a cold, sterile white room putting chemicals into people who’d already lived. She was living about as much as they were, then. But now she was gone from them, the last one put in the ground, burials and solemn words and sobbing and fake flowers and caskets – all of that was over with.
Now it was her turn to live.
About this book
This is a FLAME TREE PRESS BOOK
Text copyright © 2019 Andrew Post
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
FLAME TREE PRESS, 6 Melbray Mews, London, SW6 3NS, UK, flametreepress.com
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Thanks to the Flame Tree Press team, including: Taylor Bentley, Frances Bodiam, Federica Ciaravella, Don D’Auria, Chris Herbert, Matteo Middlemiss, Josie Mitchell, Mike Spender, Will Rough, Cat Taylor, Maria Tissot, Nick Wells, Gillian Whitaker. The cover is created by Flame Tree Studio with thanks to Nik Keevil and Shutterstock.com.
FLAME TREE PRESS is an imprint of Flame Tree Publishing Ltd. flametreepublishing.com. A copy of the CIP data for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
HB ISBN: 978-1-78758-285-9, PB ISBN: 978-1-78758-283-5, ebook ISBN: 978-1-78758-286-6 | Also available in FLAME TREE AUDIO | Created in London and New York
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