Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #18

Dr. Fay, the therapist my parents sent me to see when they were prematurely concerned about my mental well being, would occasionally catch her tongue in her teeth and speak a word or two with a prolonged lisp. It wasn't until I'd seen her half a dozen times did I find the courage to look her in the eye, but I got to where I would almost hope to hear that lisp as one of my parents drove me across town to Dr. Fay's office. Something about it was alluring. Considering our family's often-precarious finances, in retrospect I should have appreciated my therapy more if only because I know now that my parents were going without something or another just so I could get the "help" they believed I needed.

"We'd like you to see someone," my mother said to me one autumn evening.

"Someone?" I said.

"Someone you might like to talk to," she said.

"Oh," I said. I thought of my friend Brian whose parents had taken him to "see someone" about the oval knob of bone on his forehead. That knob had turned out to be something bad, though in the decorum of small towns nobody ever gave me or my siblings the details. Brian left school a week later, and he and his family pretty much disappeared. "Sometimes people just grieve," my father told me, but I was too young to understand what that meant.

"It's a counselor," my mother said. "Your father and I spoke to her a few weeks ago, and she sounds very nice. "We'd like you to talk to her, too."

"Why?" I asked.

My mother bit her lower lip and squinted her left eye the way she did when she searched for answers. "She's very nice. Maybe you can tell her things that you don't want to tell anyone else."

"Like what?" This was the first time in my life when I considered that keeping things to myself was considered bad form.

Now my mother shrugged. "Things that might bother you."

"I talk to people all the time," I said. "Steven and I talk every night before we go to sleep."

She smiled. "I know. We hear the two of you. It's nice."

"Will she ask me questions?"

"Probably." Then she seemed to recognize something. "But it's not because you've done something wrong. This isn't a punishment."

Our first hour together, Dr. Fay did ask a lot of questions--about my brother and sister, mostly, but also other things that didn't seem to matter. "You like sports?" she asked.

"Not watching, but playing," I said.

"Which sports?"

"Baseball, mostly. Football's good. I'm not very good at basketball."

"Do you and Steven play together?"

I nodded. "When we can. He's smaller and younger, but he's faster and seems to know more than I do."

"He knows more about what?"

"How things work. How teams work together, too. He seems to know what's going to happen in a game before it even does."

"He sounds like a good brother." That was the first time I heard the lisp: thhhounds.

I said that he was a very good brother.

"Your parents are worried about you," Dr. Fay said.

"About what? I'm not a bad kid." I'd heard enough stories about "bad kids" to know that, mostly, I wasn't one.

"No, you're not a bad kid. And your mom and dad don't think you are. They just worry because you seem sad."

"I've told them I'm not sad." I thought about what my Uncle Frank had said once about my being quieter than a dead loon.

She changed the topic. "How's school?"

"It's fine," I said. "I've got nice teachers."

"I'm sure you do," Dr. Fay said. She let me stay silent before she said anything else, something I liked about her.

"Would you like to come back again?"

I had to wonder if this was a test of some sort. "Do I have to?" I was young enough to know that I probably did not have a choice.

"You never have to," she said. "Your mom and dad would like you to."

"What do you want?" I asked.

She seemed surprised by the question. "I'd like to talk to you some more."


On the quiet, motionless train, I wondered if the year's worth of discussions with Dr. Fay had done me any good. My parents and I had spoken very little about the visits, and they never told me why the visits stopped. For years I assumed that Dr. Fay--and probably my parents--had given up on me and pronounced me a lost cause. When I told Peggy about the therapy, she smiled.

"I think it's sweet," Peggy said. "Your parents cared enough about you to try something like that."

"I'm not convinced I needed 'something like that'," I said. I told her how I'd avoided Dr. Fay's eyes for a long time.

"You must have felt threatened," Peggy said. "Or scared."

"Maybe. But I got over it."

"What happened when you did?"

"I looked her in the eyes," I said, "and then things changed."

"How?"

"She had one blue eye and one brown eye."

"How did that change things?" Peggy asked. "So she had two different colored eyes."

I thought about it. "I just never knew which one of them to trust," I said.

Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #17

“You want anything to eat?” my father asked.

I was looking through a window on the other side of the train than I had been in the observation car, but nothing seemed any different.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Are you being polite, or are you really not hungry?

“I’m really not hungry.”

“You should go find your brother and sister,” my father said.

“I saw Margie a little while ago.”

“Hard to see how the five of us could spend so much time apart on this train,” he said.

“None of us particularly likes sitting still,” I said

He laughed. “That’s true! Used to drive your mother and me crazy when the three of you were little. Seems like we spent half our time looking for one or another of you.” He turned his head to look at me, and his voice dropped. “You were the worst, though. You know that. You never quite grew out of it.”

“Steven’s the only one of us who actually ran away from home,” I said. Which was true: he’d packed a small backpack with clothes and books, walked into the kitchen, and announced to the rest of us that he was leaving home. To their credit, my parents let him go. When he returned a couple days later, nobody said a thing.

“I guess we all run from things at some point,” my father said. “Steven just got it out of his system early.”

“Margie’s never left,” I said. “She’s pretty stable.”

“No, she never actually went anywhere. But during her freshman year of high school she threatened to leave nearly every week. She and your mother used to go at it like wildcats.”

“I don’t remember that,” I said.

“I do. Your mother would end up crying in our bedroom, and Margie would end up crying in hers. I tried talking to them both a couple of times, but they made it clear I had nothing to offer. Now they’re great friends.”

“What was it like with you and Uncle Frank?” I asked.

“Best of friends and worst of enemies,” he said. “Different than you and Steven. You two seemed more stable together. Uncle Frank and I would beat the crap out of each other in the morning, and by bedtime we were buddies again.”

“That therapist you and Mom sent me to asked me what I thought about you and Uncle Frank,” I said.

This seemed to pique his interest. “What the hell did she ask that for?”

I shrugged. “I don’t remember the details. Something about the male role models I had. I told her that Steven was my real role model, and she found that odd—that I would see my little brother like that.”

“For the record, it wasn’t my idea to send you to a therapist.”

“You blaming Mom?”

He chuckled. “Nope. I just said it wasn’t my idea. I’m not saying that I didn’t end up agreeing with it.”

“I never trusted her,” I said.

“Your mother?”

“The therapist.”

“I’m not sure I did, either.”

“She was nice enough, but I didn’t know what I was supposed to tell her.”

My father processed that idea for a moment. “I think you were supposed to tell her whatever you wanted to tell her. Your mom and I were just worried about you. For a long time we thought that we’d done something wrong.”

“You didn’t,” I said.

“We didn’t know that,” he said. “At least, we didn’t know it for a long time.”

“I’ve never blamed anyone for anything,” I said. “I just get nervous sometimes. Especially when there are a lot of people around. And I’ve never gotten used to strangers.”

“You afraid you’ll not hit the mark with anyone?” he asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “Peggy always said I was just born afraid.”

“Peggy was a good woman,” he said.

I thought about Peggy then. A few days before she left, we were lying in bed and listening to a light rain. “Things are going to be so much different,” she said. “Things are always different,” I said. She turned onto her side and stared at me. “What does that mean?” “Nothing,” I said.

My father shifted in his seat. “You still have that notebook?”

I handed the Rhodia to him.

“You write anything?” He leafed through some pages.

“Not much of a writer,” I said. “That’s another thing I had to do with that therapist—write things. She thought it would help me express my thoughts.”

“Did it?”

“Nope. But I made up a lot of stuff just to keep her happy.”

“There’s a lot of stuff in here,” he said. “Ophelia seems to have found a way to get people talking about things.” He read something, then he cleared his throat. “Here—Ophelia wrote this, too.” He handed me the notebook. “Read this.” He touched his finger on a short paragraph.

From Thoreau’s On Walden Pond

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.

“What do you think?” my father asked.

“Ophelia sounds lonely,” I said.

“That’s not Ophelia writing,” he said, “it’s Thoreau.”

“Still, Ophelia put it in here. It must have meant something to her.”

“Maybe,” my father said. “But if that’s what she believes, she’s not saying that she is lonely. She’s saying that it’s okay to be alone—that it is not the same as loneliness. And maybe a person can feel very lonely even when there’s a crowd of people around.”

“Maybe I should re-read it,” I said. “I feel like I’m missing something.”

My father stood up and stretched in the aisle. “I’ll be back. I’m going to go refill my flask.” He patted the pocket of his shirt.

“They don’t sell that on the train,” I said.

“I was a Boy Scout,” he said, “and I was prepared. I’ve got a half gallon of the stuff in your brother’s duffle bag. I just have to find your brother.”

When he was gone, I looked through the notebook and saw that though many of the passages were in different colors of ink and had been signed by different people, the penmanship was similar to Ophelia’s. The train lurched, and it seemed we had begun to move. Soon enough, though, we were motionless again, and I set off to find my father.

Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #16

Miss Orange County

I have always found it somewhat odd that when I think of my ex-wife, I think of Peggy. I never think of my marriage to Ellen. Perhaps this is because Ellen and I were together for barely a year, and only six months into our marriage we both realized neither of us would ever be sober or sane enough to survive much longer sharing the same life. Ellen was closer to the bottom of things than I was at that point, but somewhere in our respective doldrums we recognized how bad things were.

“You’ll find someone else,” Peggy said as she packed her final box. I watched her hesitate as she considered taking a picture of the two of us standing on the Golden Gate Bridge. When she finally decided to leave it behind, I was more sad than angry.

“I don’t think I will,” I said. But I did. I had been working as a waiter in a small restaurant in Winnemucca, Nevada, and Ellen was a regular who always came in with a group of people who always seemed to be having fun. When Mario, my boss, told me that Ellen was a prostitute, I wasn’t bothered. I had stopped judging people years earlier.

Ellen and I started slowly, casually. After a six months of mutual flirtation, we took advantage of Nevada’s casual requirements for marriage and were married by one of her former clients, a married man who said he was sad to see Ellen trade lying on her back for less-honest work. Ellen got a job at the Ace Hardware store that was owned by another of her former clients who said he’d gotten too old for sex but still appreciated all Ellen had done for him over the years. “It’s not just sex men are looking for when they come to see me,” Ellen told me once.

Ellen was also a former Miss Orange County. “I thought I’d end up being Miss America,” she told me. It was her claim to fame, she said, since she’d won fair and square. “I’m not stupid, and it wasn’t easy. I worked hard for that title.” Ellen was the only person I had ever known who had even come that close to anything famous, even fame in a place as small as Orange County. "The closest thing to reality in that place is Disneyland. There were a lot of girls who wanted that title. Most of them were too blonde and too conservative in a year when the judges were looking for someone different, and being someone different isn't easy in Orange County. I was lucky—it was my year.” I felt special being with her knowing how hard she had worked to achieve something,

Then, though, during a quest for Miss California, she found out she was easier manipulated than she thought possible. “I slept with a couple of people involved with the pageant,” she said, “and I found that I liked sex and cocaine more than I liked winning beauty pageants. One thing led to another, and on a morning in September I found myself buying a house in Winnemucca. I gave up most of the cocaine but kind of enjoyed the sex.”

Our first couple of months together were great fun. Ellen stayed in touch with old friends and former clients, and we allowed each other to be more self-destructive than we might have been alone. Peggy and I had been down some bad roads, but we also found ways to say stop. But Ellen and I couldn’t do that, and it wasn’t long until we were both out of work when my restaurant closed and the Ace Hardware had enough of Ellen’s lack of dependability. If Ellen hadn’t had a bought-and-paid-for house, we would’ve been homeless. Somewhere in the middle of everything, though, we found the strength to divorce as easily as we’d gotten married. Ellen sold the house and moved to Colorado, and I went back to California. She left a message on my answering machine one night saying she was fine, that she had re-married and now had two step-children and had found God. She said she would pray for me, but that I was not to call her back.

The only person I did call after that was Peggy, who was working as a pre-school teacher in Port Angeles, Washington. She was single and going to college, and I told her I was proud of her. “I still miss you,” I said. I didn’t know if I should’ve have been proud of my two wives that they had worked their way back to their feet, or if I should be disappointed that I had not.

“It’s been a long time,” Peggy said.

“I never even told my family about Ellen,” I told her.

“Why are you telling me?” She sounded distracted.

“I thought you would be interested,” I said. “You were always interested in me, weren’t you?”

She was silent for a moment. “Yes,” she said. “Have you changed?”

“I like to think I have.”

“Ellen doesn’t like someone you would be involved with if you had changed.”

“Ellen’s gone now.”

“But she was there,” Peggy said. “You were married to her.”

“I’m not sure what you want me to say, Peggy.”

She was quiet again, and I did not know if she was even breathing. “I’m not sure, either. I don’t know if I should say anything. I’ve got a good life here now. Are you happy for me?”

“I have always been happy for you, Peggy.”

I wanted the train to move. More people had come into the observation car, and they all seemed anxious, perturbed. We all wanted to be moving, or at least to know why we were not. The air in the train seemed different—more stale and close. I didn’t like sitting still like this because without movement, I tended to dwell upon mistakes I had made or memories of people I had either (or both) loved or hurt. Part of me knew that I should be happy about being so close to my family, even my dead aunt and uncle.

When a group of small children pushed into the observation car and took seats around me, I left and returned to where my brother and I had been seated. My father, though, had taken my brother’s place. “Where’s Steven?” I asked as I sat beside my father.

“He went to talk to your cousin somewhere,” my father said. “I told him I’d keep his seat warm.”

“Any idea why we’re stuck here?” I asked.

“You didn’t have to come.”

“I mean, stuck wherever were stuck—why the train’s not moving.”

My father shook his head. “Nope.”

“We’ve got to get moving,” I said.

“We’ll probably stop again in Helper.” He had pulled out the route map. “That’s our next stop. Helper, Utah.”

“I know,” I said.

Warm Whiskey in a Cold Ditch: Installment #15

I wanted to sleep. I was suddenly quite weary of being on the train. I should have returned to sit next to my brother in a more comfortable seat, but experience told me that my desire to sleep would be over-ruled by my inability to do just that. "It's insomnia," a doctor had once told me when I'd complained about so many nights of sleeplessness. "It won't hurt you."

The train had stopped for nearly half an hour, and now it was barely moving, as if it felt the same anxiety about getting to Helper as I did. Earlier, a group of teenagers had giggled their way through the observation car, and I envied their ability to be so openly foolish. They had lingered for awhile before passing through to the next car and leaving silence to claim the space they left behind. I still clutched the Rhodia and my sister's pen, but I had not yet written anything despite all good intentions. As the train stopped again, I opened the notebook again, leafed past more of Ophelia's writings, and found something long, something to occupy me.

Words Like Love

After six hours of what started out to be aimless driving, I ended up in Bridgeport in front of a combination café and bar called Little Clancey’s, though I was probably headed there the moment I left home. The “Little” on the hand-painted sign had faded, but “Clancey’s” in red letters was bright in a sunrise diffused by thin clouds. I’d traveled through California’s dry central valley, then turned east through Yosemite and finally north on Highway 395, just like we sometimes do when we visit our daughter Becky and her husband Ron in Carson City. By the time I reached Mono Lake, the eastern sky was crimson and I knew that Bridgeport was just north and would be the place to stop.

All four windows of the Impala were open when I rolled onto the gravel in front of Clancy’s, and a cool breeze brushed gently against my bare arms. I used to drink a lot, and when I did every window in the house or car would be shut tightly. The voices, the ceaseless wind, the smells—everything used to bother me. Now, though, working my way through sobriety, I welcome the fresh air and keep at least one window open wherever I happen to be.

“You’ll catch cold,” Nora, my wife of twenty-five years, will say when I keep both bedroom windows open all night even in winter.

“Viruses cause colds,” I tell her as she pulls the heavy quilt closer to her wide chin, “not open windows or even getting your feet wet.” But after awhile she’ll get up and shut the windows, caught up in one of my old habits.

I sat in the Impala and thought that Nora would be wondering where I had gone. She’d given up actually worrying years earlier, when I was drunk most of the time and hardly found my way home anyway.

“You could call me if you’re not coming home,” she would plead. “A little respect is all I ask. Just the smallest bit of consideration. Is that too much?”

It was too much, as far as I was concerned at that point in my life, in our marriage. “I’m an adult,” I’d tell her. “I don’t have to check in with you.”

We went on like that until one day Nora quit asking questions. But she would always wonder, even when I left the house last night with her yelling at me. We’d been watching television and a beer commercial came on. I told her that a beer would taste good, a nice cold beer in chilled mug, just like on television.

“A what?” Nora said very quietly. “God damn you, Brian. You go this long without a drink and after all that’s happened and you can still say it so easily, as if it meant nothing to either one of us?”

“I didn’t say I wanted one,” I said loudly. “I just said it would taste good.” I looked down at the worn carpeting in front of the couch, where our feet spend so much time.

And then she yelled about how my father had been drunk for so long that nearly his whole liver was eaten away by the time he died. About how close my drinking had come to killing both her and me, that if she hadn’t been in the car on my last birthday I surely would have died. She stopped yelling when she ran out of breath. Her chest was heaving beneath her lightweight pink blouse. Nora’s eyes were dark with disappointment like they were after Sam Tinker threw me the surprise birthday party, when she came to see me at the hospital. It was two days after I’d lost control of the Ford wagon we owned and Nora and I went bouncing into a large stand of aspens.

“Jesus Christ,” Nora had said after pulling me from the car and cradling my face in her hands. She got only a few scratches across her chin, but I caught the steering wheel with my sternum and then the dashboard with my forehead. For months afterward it hurt even to breathe.

Lying on the grass, I’d looked up at her, feeling her kiss my mouth time after time. Everything was confused, but I didn’t know if it was because of the accident or the pitcher of martinis I’d helped Sam drink earlier that night. It was raining, and drops of cool water were falling from Nora’s hair onto my face. Then everything turned a dark purple and I shut my eyes as Nora’s voice disappeared.

After Nora finally got her breath back last night, she stood from the couch and started in on me again, using words like responsibility and trust and love. So I took my keys from their hook beneath the phone in the kitchen, and I walked out the front door, letting her yell from the front porch as I started the car and left. At the Shell station I filled the Impala and got a cup of coffee, then drove away.

When I stepped into Clancey’s, Maureen was doing the beer orders for the week; I was the only one in the place. I’d met her years earlier, one of the times I’d driven alone to see Becky. Nora travels on her job selling pharmaceuticals to hospitals, so sometimes when she is away I wander. This morning I asked Maureen if she remembered me, but when she said she wasn’t sure, I told her that it made no difference.

Maureen had dark, curly hair and the smooth facial features—thick cheekbones and a mouth burned down at the edges—that I’d found myself falling love with for as long as I could remember. She reminded me of a waitress, a good dancer, that I’d known when I was in the Navy. But then, it seems every woman I’ve either had or desired has reminded me of someone else or the lover before.

“Why’d you come back?” Maureen asked when she filled our mugs with coffee. One coffee pot had DECAFFEINATED stenciled on it in bright orange letters. Some of the letters were partially scratched away, as if the pot had been in use for a long time.

“Restlessness,” I said, wondering if I should say that maybe it was because of her that I’d stopped there.

“How does your wife feel about that?” She gestured with her mug toward my ring finger.

“She understands.” I looked at the ring and tried to think of the last time I’d taken it off.

“You mean, she puts up with it.” She looked at me as if she’d heard lies from men for a long time.

I left the bar after two mugs of coffee, after Maureen got busy with other customers. Wandering around town until lunchtime, I finally stopped at Cleo’s Drive-In, where I ate a chicken-breast sandwich at one of the redwood picnic tables. I watched Maureen come out of the bar across the street, walking toward Cleo’s. She smiled when she noticed me.

“Still restless?” She said after ordering at the walk-up window. Her hair was neat and her legs thin, and I knew that she was the type of woman who took care of herself.

“Yeah,” I said. The Sawtooth Ridge was visible over her shoulder.

“At least you’re eating,” Maureen said. “I haven’t had a customer so early on a Saturday for quite some time.”

“I like coffee after a long drive,” I told her.

She took a bag from the girl at the window just as I finished my sandwich. “You feel better, now that you’ve eaten?”

“I feel good,” I said. “I feel almost....” I paused and looked up at the gray, ragged Sawtooth, trying to think of the right word, the right feeling.

“Almost what?”

“Almost human,” is what I told her. It was the most fitting word I could think of.

She nodded slowly, then followed my gaze up to the Sawtooth. “It’s going to rain. Come over later and I’ll buy you a beer.”

“Thanks,” I said, again thinking that a beer would taste good.

Maureen smiled as she turned and walked back to Clancey’s. I sat at the table and stared at the mountains. The ridge was high, nearly eleven-thousand feet, and I had spent a lot of time hiking in the area when I was younger. Below the ridge itself was Matterhorn Canyon, where a combination of ignorance and exhaustion almost killed me and Sam Tinker both. Just as after the car wreck, it was an experience that left me changed, though it changed me into someone who drank heavily. Though I never figured out why, it was after that when I started believing that nothing I did in life mattered. Most people would have reacted differently, but I just stopped caring about a lot of things.

After Maureen left, I decided to drive to Carson City after all. Becky always appreciates it when her mom and I visit, since she’s so far away from us. She and Ron have a small hardware store, and more than once I’ve helped them stock conduit or boxes and bins of nails.

“Oh, Daddy,” Becky said when I called her from a payphone at Cleo’s. “We’re just on our way out. We need some stuff from a warehouse in Reno, so we’re making a long weekend of it.”

“That’s fine, Becky,” I said, and it really was. “Enjoy the weekend. Maybe Mom and I will drive up next month.” If I had told her how far I had driven that morning, she might have changed her mind.

“Give her my love,” Becky said, and I told her I would.

I hung up the phone and looked at clouds covering the Sawtooth and thought back to when Sam and I got caught in the autumn snowstorm and nearly didn’t make it out. We were carrying neither a tent nor warm clothing, and for a full day we huddled around a small fire and waited for the storm to pass. We never told anyone about it, either, because we knew we’d been fools for being so unprepared. But several times in the years that followed, when Nora and I weren’t even talking to each other, I thought that the mountains might have been the place to die when I had the chance.

The wind had grown colder, and the clouds had dropped over Bridgeport. I smelled rain as I pulled my windbreaker from the Impala’s trunk. When I got back to Clancey’s for the last mug of coffee, Maureen wasn’t surprised when I said I was leaving.

“I had a feeling you would be,” she said. Her hands were wet from washing glasses in the small sink behind the bar. “I could still buy you a beer.”

“I have a long drive,” I told her. “But I might be back, if you want to save it for me.”

She smiled, showing teeth that were white and straight. “You’ll be back,” she said, though I wasn’t sure how she meant it. I stared at her, but she turned away before I could tell her that she probably was right.

I got home late that night after driving slowly through rain most of the way. The weather didn’t break until I stopped at a mini-mart to buy cherry Lifesavers. Outside the store I saw stars winking through small gaps between clouds sliding across the sky.

As I parked the Chevy in the driveway, I slipped a Lifesaver beneath my tongue. Candy had once been a way to hide the smell of what I’d been drinking, but now it just tasted good. When I stepped quietly into the house, I let the last sliver of a Lifesaver drop down my throat. Nora was watching television, and I smelled her lilac perfume, my favorite, as soon as I shut the door behind me.

“You came home.” She didn’t look up. Her feet were propped up on the large footstool we’d bought just a week earlier.

“Yeah. I had some things to work out.” I took off my shoes and wiggled my toes on the carpet.

“We were supposed to go to dinner,” she said, and I noticed then how she was dressed up, still expecting to go out. That was why she was wearing perfume. “We were supposed to eat at someplace nice, and that’s all I’ve been waiting for. I thought you’d be home, so I never cancelled the reservation.”

I didn’t remember anything about dinner, but I didn’t doubt her. “Tomorrow,” I told her. “I forgot. I’m sorry. We’ll do it tomorrow and make it special.”

“Have you been drinking? You’re eating candy.” It was the first time she looked at me since I’d come into the house, and her stare was cold.

“I’ve been driving,” I said, fingering the single remaining Lifesaver in my pocket, wondering how she had noticed the candy from twelve feet away. I thought that even after twenty-five years of marriage it would be nice to have at least one secret, to have something that Nora did not know.

“Nice way for you to show your love for me,” she said plainly. “Skipping dinner for getting drunk. You could have called and then at least I could have eaten here. I could have fixed something instead of sitting here and waiting.”

“I do love you,” I told her. “And I’m not drunk.” But she’d been drinking—a half-full bottle of gin and a glass with ice were on the floor beside the couch. I wondered about the Sawthooth, about whether the ridge was now covered with snow. And I wondered about Maureen and her beer orders, even about what she’d bought for lunch at Cleo’s.

Nora had tried to hide the gin, and I wanted to say that it didn’t matter to me what she did or whether she believed that I was sober. I didn’t care if she was drunk then or drunk for the rest of her life.

“You do love me?” she asked. “You do?” She wasn’t convinced. But she was drunk and nothing would matter by morning. Her perfume was strong, and I wanted it to be stronger yet, to envelope me and the house and all that I knew in its silky embrace.

“I do,” I said, “I really do. You’re a princess.” I thought then that one day soon I would tell her about nearly being frozen in the mountains, about what that experience had done to me.

“Yeah?” She came over to me and took my hand, holding it to the side of her face.

“Yeah,” I said, and I sat down beside her to watch television.