“About that,” Braden says, and Phee feels the car grow smaller around her under the weight of promises that won’t allow themselves to be broken. “Is that why you’ve really interrupted me from my drinking? To give me a pep talk on getting back to playing the cello?”
“I thought we’d eat dinner first. Take a walk. See a movie.”
“But all roads lead there in the end? You’re like Coleridge’s ancient mariner, you know that? Minus the beard and the albatross, but equally obsessed.”
“Oh, the albatross is there, all right, you just can’t see it.”
The fragrance wafting out of the take-out boxes, once mouthwatering, now makes her feel ill. The conversation on the horizon is about as appetizing as a bowl full of maggots.
Braden is the one who finally breaks an increasingly uncomfortable silence. “You showed up at my door like a visitation from fate or the furies. There was even this wild red sunset behind you, storm clouds piled up over the houses across the street.”
“I remember.”
“You stood there in the doorway with the sky burning behind you, cold wind flowing in, and asked, ‘Are you playing? You need to be playing.’”
“You slammed the door in my face.” The moment is etched in Phee’s memory. The ominous red shift to the light, dry leaves scuttling in the wind, the fresh scar on Braden’s face and the despair in his eyes.
“It was the day the bandages came off for the last time. As long as my fingers were all wrapped up, out of sight, I’d told myself my hands would be fine; all of the weird sensation was from too-tight dressings. And then the bandages were off, and the skin was all healed, and still . . . Lilian always said the music was a curse. That was the day I knew she was right.”
His ragged breathing tears at Phee’s heart.
“It’s not the music that’s a curse, it’s the absence thereof,” she says. “Listen, I don’t blame you for thinking I’m evil—”
“Not evil per se—”
“Or insane. But we have this good food and we’re here at the park. Let’s call a truce. Let’s take a walk and eat Chinese food and pretend that we’ve never met and have no history.”
“That is probably the craziest thing you have said yet.”
“Humor me.”
“Is this your idea of an adventure?”
“Oh no. I wouldn’t take a total stranger on an adventure. And if I did, there would be a scavenger hunt or a murder mystery party or some such. Nothing so boring as a picnic in the rain.”
“No plans to throw me into the bay or kill me with pneumonia?”
“Are you prone to pneumonia?” Phee snaps the leash on the dog and digs out the spare windbreaker she keeps under the seat in case of emergency.
It covers most of what it’s supposed to when Braden puts it on. His wrists stick out beyond the sleeves, and it’s a little narrow in the shoulders, but otherwise it works okay.
They set off, side by side, Phee keeping Celestine between them as a physical barrier. The parking lot, crowded in the summer, is almost deserted now. They pass an elderly couple walking a small, nondescript dog. A couple of teenagers stare at them defiantly.
Braden returns their stare, and Phee knows he’s thinking about his daughter.
“Talk to me,” he says, after a moment. “Something, anything. How about the Adventure Angels. Are they your brain wave?”
“Mine. And Oscar’s. I suck at following rules. AA just depressed me. Same old people doing the same old thing for the rest of their same old lives. Like driving through Kansas, only all of the fields are dust and you’re stuck in some sort of purgatory where that’s it and all it’s going to be. That’s how it felt. I kept going back to it, because it seems to work for everybody else. And I’d always get tripped up on the making-amends step, because I couldn’t really make amends, and I’d go back to drinking. It felt like playing a video game, only I could never level up.”
“And then?”
“And then I met Oscar. We met in a bar, actually. Both of us already wasted. We started talking about what sobriety should look like. I blacked out and didn’t even remember most of the conversation, except that I’d scrawled things on a napkin. So I woke up the next morning, took a morning drink to get me balanced, and there was this message to myself on the kitchen table. A list: make