One minute at a time, one hour at a time, one day at a time, I kept going.
The new muffler arrived and I put it in. My car no longer sounded like a Harley. And I made it to another Thursday Dinner. This one was at the Abrahams’ house, and this time I brought a bottle of red wine, even though I wouldn’t be drinking any. With something in my hands when I arrived, I didn’t feel like a total sponge.
I sat next to May at their table and soaked up the good vibes of the people around me. May got tipsy and told me a funny story about accidentally locking herself in the chicken coop.
For another week I’d persevered.
In the minus column, I still couldn’t sleep. The worst hours of the night were from about four to about five-thirty in the morning. Inevitably, I’d fall asleep a half-hour before my alarm was set to go off and then wake up insanely groggy. To combat this problem (and to avoid harming myself in a sleep haze during the first hour of my workday) I mainlined Pepsi before, during and after each tire change.
Business was decent, but I was dealt another blow. On Monday, a cop pulled into the garage’s driveway and wrote me a seventy-dollar ticket for obstructing the sidewalk with my new sign.
By far my biggest accomplishment of the week was staying silent while he wrote it out. I wanted to rage at him and argue that his own vehicle was presently obstructing far more of the sidewalk than my freaking sign.
I didn’t say a word, though. Anyone with a felony record cannot talk back to a cop. It’s just a fact of life, and one that I’d be living with forever. And the seventy bucks? Just the cost of doing business, I told myself. The police chief had probably noticed I’d come back to town and declared it open season to harass me.
After he left, I dragged my sign inside the garage. That meant more days working with the doors open, in the hopes that people could even see the damn sign. My hands were red and numb by noon every day.
Also in the minus column—my cravings were pretty fierce. I hadn’t been to a NA meeting since coming back to Colebury. Before I left the Shipley Farm May had printed out a list of nearby meetings. The only one in Colebury was on Wednesday afternoons at four o’clock.
That was a working hour for me. And when Wednesday rolled around, I was doing actual bodywork—fixing a dent in somebody’s Highlander. But I made myself close the garage down at three thirty. My father hadn’t made an appearance for several hours. I locked up, then knocked on the front door of my childhood home, which was always weird. He came to the door looking glassy-eyed.
“I shut ’er down,” I said. “Got somewhere I have to be.”
“What if somebody comes?” he asked.
I just stared at him for a second, waiting for the logic of the question to kick in for him. In other words—what the fuck would you do without your slave boy? But no light shone in my old man’s eyes. “Guess you’ll have to deal with them,” I said, finally.
Then I turned and left him there, puzzling over it.
After a quick shower, I walked to the church instead of driving. It was only about four blocks, and I told myself that I needed the exercise. But really, I just wanted to walk through the first snowflakes of the year. They were thick and wet, landing on my face and in my hair. The sidewalk began to turn white, and my feet made tracks on the pavement.
Up ahead, the stone church fit in with this pretty picture, too. It was the same Catholic church that Sophie’s parents had dragged her to every Sunday during high school. She wasn’t a big churchgoer, my Sophie. She hated sitting through the service, and she avoided it every chance she got.
I knew I shouldn’t be thinking of her as my Sophie. But at the time it had been true.
The door handle was wrought iron—the kind they don’t make anymore. I gave it a yank. Inside, a hand-lettered sign on the wall read “NA Meetin Downstairs.” The missing G could have been a mistake, or it could have been ironic. Either way, I found myself descending into a far less picturesque part of the building. There were fluorescent lights and dinged-up old plastered walls.
I knew I was in the right place when I saw the carafe of coffee and the cheap paper cups sitting beside a powdered creamer. (There must be a law on the books somewhere that you couldn’t bring a bunch of addicts together into a room without offering them some really bad coffee.) They also had the regulation metal folding chairs, just three rows of them.
A small meeting for a small town.