That night was the first time that Cassie had crept from her bed while everyone else in the house was asleep and opened the cabinet where her parents stored the liquor. There was Jack Daniel’s, of course, but Cassie knew that was reserved for “special” occasions. Mostly her father drank a Scotch whiskey called Black Bottle, and the level of liquid was about at the top of the label. It was three-quarters full. She poured out an inch and then added an inch of tap water. She did the same with the vodka and the bourbon and the gin. She wished she could do the same with the beer in the refrigerator, but each can was sealed and so that was impossible.
“But I had my own bedroom there,” Rosemary said, and Cassie felt herself wincing inside at the word there. Rosemary would go from there to the foster home, where she would share a strange bedroom with a strange girl—another teen in the foster care system—who was angry and violent but could dial it down just enough in front of their foster parents to stick around. It was hard to believe that the saltbox with the watered-down gin and their father’s drinking and their mother’s weeping and their weekly fights about money and booze was a well with sufficiently happy memories that Rosemary wanted to share the house with her children. How many evenings had Cassie tried to drown out their fights by cocooning inside her Walkman headset? How many nights had poor Rosemary crawled into bed with her, sobbing and scared?
“More tea, Cassie?” Dennis was holding the pot near her teacup.
“Yes, please,” she said, though she would have preferred a Long Island iced tea: tequila, gin, vodka, rum, triple sec. The whole damn cabinet in a highball glass. At the table beside them, everyone had a bottle of Tsingtao beer. She wanted one of those, too.
“And we actually had a very nice swing set and playhouse in the backyard,” Rosemary went on. “It was made of wood—not metal that rusted out as soon as it rained. My friends and I used to play Little House on the Prairie on it. The timbers were so thick and sturdy, they looked like they belonged on a log cabin.”
“That sounds like the lamest game ever,” her son said.
“Oh, it was,” Rosemary agreed. “Totally lame. But we were little.”
Cassie sipped her tea and recalled that moment after college when she broke her vow of alcohol abstinence. She was twenty-three and was at the swimming pool at a hotel in Miami. There were afternoon thunderstorms in the Northeast and their flight back to New York had been canceled, and so the crew was sent to a hotel. It was in Coral Gables and had a rooftop pool. There were crews late that afternoon from three different carriers because the hotel filled its rooms in the summer—the off-season—with airline employees. Everyone was drinking, except her. The flight attendant on the chaise beside her, a motherly veteran who had been flying twenty-five years, was sipping a pi?a colada, and it smelled heavenly. Cassie considered ordering a virgin colada, but the waiter wasn’t nearby, and the idea of getting up and going to the bar seemed like a lot of work at five in the afternoon, the temperature still in the mid-eighties. And so she had taken a sip. And it was good. Better than a virgin colada, the taste sharper, the tingle deep, deep inside her. She inhaled the aromas of coconut and pineapple, yes, but there was also something else. Something more. Rum. Had there ever been rum in her parents’ kitchen in Kentucky? Probably. But she had no memory of watering down a bottle or of her mother cascading rum down the sink. It felt different and new, and though she sensed she was flirting with something so wonderful but—for her—so reckless that it would kill her, she pushed herself to her feet and walked to the pool bar in her bikini. She ordered a pi?a colada for herself. Did she even bother to nibble on the pineapple wedge? Probably not. She drank it fast because it was sweet and she could feel the way it warmed her insides and made her worries go away. Suddenly, she wasn’t fretting about her hips. They were fine. She was fine. She was no longer that girl who was scared in the backseat of the car as her drunken father tried to control their hideous robin’s-egg-blue Dodge Colt on the winding road between Landaff and Grover’s Mill, her mother yelling at him to please, please, please, for God’s sake let her drive. She wasn’t that anxious college student, awake at four a.m. at the college switchboard, praying to herself that her kid sister would be okay in the foster home. She wasn’t that diligent, joyless, unremittingly responsible twenty-three-year-old flight attendant who strove for perfection in all things, because anything else was the start of the downward slope that would lead her back to the small, sad village where her father drank and her mother cried and she was pouring Black Bottle down the sink. She was…free. And she liked that. She enjoyed the taste, sure, but more than that she liked the sound of her laugh when the first officer made a joke (not especially funny, but he was cute) about the way a particular cloud in the sky over Miami looked like a puppy with a cigar. That evening he would seduce her, or she would seduce him; in hindsight—even the next morning—she really hadn’t a clue. She learned quickly that music sounded better, people were nicer, and she was prettier when life’s rough edges had been smoothed over with a little alcohol. Or, better still, with a lot. What fault could anybody possibly find in any of that? God, it was good, it was all good, and it was all Cassie could do that very moment in the Chinese restaurant not to violate Rosemary’s Rules and summon the waiter to bring her a Tsingtao, too. Or, better yet, a gin and tonic made with Beefeater or Sacred or Sipsmith, if they had it.
“I’m reading a book about a pilot,” her niece was saying to her, and Cassie turned to her and tried to focus.
“Oh? Tell me about it,” she said.
And her niece did and she tried to pay attention, but a part of her was recalling the denial that marked her drinking in her early and midtwenties, and how she convinced herself that she wasn’t her father’s daughter and she wasn’t repeating his mistakes. She wouldn’t let alcohol destroy her the way it had destroyed him. And for over a decade and a half—until Dubai—on some level she had even believed that. Because it wasn’t until Dubai that she had really become one with her father by allowing her addiction to lead her to the dead. You can repair anything but dead. You can’t fix that.
So you buried the dead and moved on.
You burned the carbons.
The proof was in the proof.
And yet she wanted that gin and tonic. Even now. Even as she waited for a phone call from Ani Mouradian or Frank Hammond. She wanted it badly.
“Can I borrow the book when you’re done?” she asked Jessica.
“Sure, but it’s a kids’ book.”
She shrugged. “A lot of the best books are kids’ books. Charlotte’s Web. The Giver. Matilda. It’s a long list.” She smiled at the girl and then told the table that she was going to the ladies’ room. She planned to drop a ten with the bartender on the way there, curl her tongue into a funnel, and drain a shot glass of gin.
* * *
? ?
Dennis didn’t mind driving in New York City. He rather liked it, in fact. His big complaint was the cost of parking. But the hotel where they were staying in White Plains was reasonable, and so he had driven to the Bronx Zoo, which had made it easy for them all to drive to Chinatown. Then, after dinner, he insisted on chauffeuring Cassie back to her apartment. She invited them all upstairs, but it had been a long day and Dennis really didn’t want to park again. So she said her good-byes in the car and exited at the corner of Third Avenue and Twenty-Seventh Street, waving at Noah the doorman the moment she emerged from the car. She was in her apartment by eight o’clock.
* * *