she had stared down at her feet and watched several delicate gray, red, and white feathers, just like the ones she had brushed from her sweater at Chick’s the night before, float across the ground.
That night was the first Barbara Jean spent curled up on Adam’s little bed and the first time in her life she had been drunk.
When she finished talking, Carlo looked at Barbara Jean with an expression of pained empathy on his face. “Whatever happened to this guy Chick?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean did he get arrested or anything?”
“No. He just disappeared. I found out later that he went to Florida, but I never heard from him. And I didn’t see him again until this past summer.”
“Is he here now? In Plainview?”
She nodded.
Carlo reached across the table and patted her hand. “You can do something about this, you know. You can work your eighth and ninth steps.”
When he saw that, even after months of going to meetings, Barbara Jean had no idea what the eighth and ninth steps of AA were, he sighed with exasperation. In a voice that made his annoyance clear to her, he said, “Make a list of all persons you have harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all. Then make direct amends to those people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
“This Chick guy seems to be on your list, so you should go see him.”
She agreed that she would, not knowing if she meant it or not.
Carlo said, “I’ll see you at the ten-thirty meeting tomorrow.” Then he got up and left the coffee shop. She watched her sponsor walk away, this chunky man who was so comfortable doling out unpleasant truths. Barbara Jean thought, not for the first or last time, that she must have some special kind of bad luck. She’d gone searching for a witty shopping companion and ended up with a gay Italian version of Odette.
Two nights after her meeting with Carlo, that moment of clarity Odette had tried to knock into Barbara Jean’s head after she had embarrassed herself so badly outside the All-You-Can-Eat finally came. And to her amazement, it came in her library, in her Chippendale chair.
Without alcohol, her body fought sleep. Feeling ants crawling beneath her skin and unable to even imagine rest, she returned to her beautiful Chippendale chair and the Bible Clarice had burdened her with decades earlier. She did what she had done more times than she could count. She opened the book to a random page and dropped her finger. Then she read what she had landed on.
John 8:32. “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
Common as salt, as the old folks used to say. And Barbara Jean had found her fingertip pointing to this passage often enough over the years that it ordinarily held no meaning for her. But that night, John 8:32 started her thinking.
Maybe if she’d had a couple of good stiff drinks in her at that moment or if she’d had one more day of sobriety, she would have ignored this familiar verse. In either case, Barbara Jean might have simply closed up the book and gone back to bed for another stab at sleep. But she was freshly dried out and ready for a revelation. She thought later that it was likely any verse would have done the job, but that night it was John 8:32 that rolled around in her mind until it transformed from an adage into a command. Before she returned to her bed, that verse demanded and received a promise from her that she would face Chick. She would acknowledge out loud that she had used him, that she had transformed him, the father of her child, from the sweetest man she had ever known into her instrument of vengeance against his own brother. Then she would have to ask him, “What can I do to make it better?” just as he had asked her all those years earlier.
Chapter 33
Before things turned ugly, Clarice, Veronica, and Sharon sat enjoying iced tea and friendly conversation beneath a patio umbrella on the enormous redwood deck that wrapped around the back of Veronica’s house. The deck was the first in a long series of alterations Veronica had inflicted upon her redbrick ranch house after she and her mother split the money they received for the property in Leaning Tree. It occupied two-thirds of her backyard and rightfully belonged on the