spring of my senior year, when I was eighteen, a few months after my mom had just upped and left, I did something very stupid. I finished my shift at The Gap on a balmy Friday night in May, feeling lonely and adrift and also a little bit reckless. I was angry with my mom for leaving the way she did, for deciding that her life was so much more important than mine. And I was angry with my father for acting as if I no longer existed, working his shifts and spending every night in front of the TV with a six-pack of beer, utterly indifferent to me and my comings and goings.
So when a couple of guys in a beat-up Toyota Camry, parked in the corner of one of the empty West Farms Mall lots, the windows down and all the doors open, invited me over to have a beer with them, I said sure. Why not?
Normally, I wouldn’t have ever done something like that, but life hadn’t felt normal since my mom had gone. My dad was monosyllabic at the best of times, and now he was acting as if I was invisible, or if not that, then an irritation. My friends didn’t know what to do with me; they’d sympathized for a while, but it had been months since Mom had left and they were over it, even if I wasn’t. I felt angry and misunderstood and alone, and so I shrugged as if I did this all the time, and took the can of Bud Light they offered me as though it were no big deal.
If it sounds sketchy, it wasn’t as much as even I’d originally thought, with guys calling me over as I walked across the hot tarmac. They were actually in my year at high school, and after exchanging hellos we realized we very vaguely knew each other. They were underage, yes, but the driver wasn’t drinking and all they wanted to do was sit and shoot the breeze. We were all destined for college in September—me to Connecticut State, two of them to UConn, another guy to one of the SUNYs.
It was warm and balmy, the evening sunlight shimmering off the tarmac, a spring breeze blowing over us, the sounds of muted traffic in the distance. Sitting with them on the hood of the car, watching the sun set over Farmington Avenue, Avon Mountain silhouetted in the distance, I felt as if I almost had a future again. I just had to wait out the summer with my dad, get through a couple more months, and then I was free. I would go to college and I wouldn’t come back. It wasn’t what I had wanted originally, but now it seemed like a way out. I felt, for the first time since my mom had left, almost hopeful.
How wrong that feeling was. I drank three beers—I know—and then, assuring my newfound friends that I was fine, I drove home. I felt a little loopy but not actually drunk, although I didn’t really know what drunk felt like. I hadn’t been to many parties during my quiet high-school years, had never done anything wild or reckless… until then.
Because I was drunk. I was over the limit, in fact, and I was, according to reports, weaving all over Route 44 as I headed back to our split-level in Bloomfield. A police car pulled me over, made me take a breathalyzer test right there, and I was booked for a DUI.
The knock-on effect of that one careless—and yes, stupid, dangerous, idiotic, irresponsible, et cetera—choice was that I basically lost everything. I lost my license for a year and was sentenced to one hundred hours of community service in a local nursing home; Connecticut State withdrew their offer of admission, and my dad more or less threw me out of the house—although, to be fair to him, I wanted to go.
In the blink of an eye, the flip of a beer top, my whole life twisted shape and became something I no longer recognized or even liked. And yes, it was my fault. I have never sought to shift blame, as tempting as that could be. It was all my fault. And yet I can’t begrudge any of it, because of Dylan.
I met Marco at the nursing home where I volunteered; he was the cook, and still is. He was charming and full of life, with curly dark hair and ridiculously long lashes, and even