through my back molars, traveled up the nape of my neck, and tickled the dusty parts of my brain.
The following urge was so familiar and came so easily, it felt like putting on an old pair of shoes, the kind with your toeprints already indented in the insoles. The kind that took you somewhere, instead of the other way around. Even now, after stringing together my longest run of sobriety ever, they still fit. But wearing them around meant moving to another home, another life. It meant going to a hell that only looked like heaven. And I had heaven already, didn’t I? I had Centennial. I had Carl. I had Alice and Nora and Anderson. I had my health.
As long as this was true, I was determined to continue my hard-fought battle, my ongoing war, even as I held this bottle in my hand, as I pressed it to my liver-spotted cheek, this bottle that contained the one thing I had ever really loved in all of my eighty-eight years of life.
8
Luann found me wandering in the pet section, still pushing my empty cart, still reeling. Something in my face led her to ask me the most basic of questions: What was my name? What year was it? Did I know what time it was?
I answered all correctly, in my opinion. I said, “My name is Duffy Sinclair, it’s the Year of the Rooster, and I suspect it’s time to go.”
And so we went.
“You can’t run off without telling us where you’ll be, Duffy—you know this. You should’ve stayed with the group, like always,” she said.
“I’m not a child,” I grunted as the bus’s doors yawned open. I hitched one leg onto the first step. Everyone watched from the windows. Josie sat in the front again and didn’t acknowledge me.
“No, you’re worse than a child,” Luann said.
I turned to her, shouting louder than necessary, “Am I?”
Everyone on the bus quieted, but I ignored them and instead focused on getting inside. When I reached the top landing, Alice gave me a worried look and a tiny headshake. A warning, not a reprimand. My outburst had internal report written all over it, and with enough of those, you might as well write your own eviction notice. Still, I sat down in my seat without apologizing to Luann. I didn’t care about her or Sharon right now, not when the eye of the storm had shifted and I had the squall of my past life to contend with.
As the bus set off from the parking lot, the bullet in my pocket, which I’d all but forgotten about, began to feel hot against my thigh. I looked around, irrationally panicked that others could see those awful bygone days: me stealing my mother’s wedding ring to buy booze while she was in hospice care, me in the back of a cop car, pantsless and puking, me browning out, blacking out, fading out. Could they see it? I thought. Could they see me killing my own dog, smashing him with both sets of wheels before my drunk ass realized I’d hit something?
Don’t be stupid, Duffy. No one knew you then. They were all too busy living their well-lived lives, and now they were buttoning them up with the same aptitude, peacefully looking out their windows and enjoying one another’s company, oblivious, and thank God for that.
Thank God, too, that eventually I got too old to be an addict. I entered my last twelve-step program because it required some effort to get drunk and stay drunk, and I didn’t even have a dependable enabler. Every decent addict needs one of those. When I got to Centennial, I was ten solid years sober, reinvented, and there seemed no safer place for the homestretch.
Except now, on account of Josie, it wasn’t.
Even with only a slice of her profile and the back of her head, I could tell she was jonesing, and jonesing bad, and as far as I was concerned, she deserved to suffer, same as me.
Shawn, with his eyes on the road but his head inclined my way, said, “Did you get all the goodies you needed from the store?”