allowed to stay overnight in that lot. The cabbie offered to help, but she thanked him and paid him and went inside to think. It was lunchtime. She ordered a drink and then she ordered a second one. The daytime bartender gave way to the nighttime bartender, and she was drunk a second day at the Bennigan’s in Stamford. She was there another five or six hours until Todd called her a cab. Todd was the nighttime bartender. When the cab came, it was the same driver. She couldn’t believe it. She drank through his night. He was getting at most three hours of sleep a day, trying to earn enough to pull his tooth. But was he fleeing his responsibilities? Was he getting drunk in her neighborhood Bennigan’s? People have such inner resources. He said, “Back to the Holiday Inn?” She went back to the Holiday Inn. Same woman at the check-in counter, same room from the night before. The next morning it was the same cabbie. “Back to the Bennigan’s?”
She asked him to help her get her car out of hock. Then she drove home. It was Monday, and Becka had already missed her first class of the week. That was the first drive she took.
She needed a place like Stamford if she was going to run away from her self-respect. Stamford was the perfect place to feel shameful. She didn’t want too much luxury around to remind her that she could afford not to be unhappy. She liked sitting at the Bennigan’s. She was attracted to it because it was just another chain in another strip mall. If it had been a real bar, the people would have been too real. It would have been the same bartender every time, the same regulars, a home away from home. But after two or three months she never saw Todd again. During her time there, there was Renell and Deirdre and Eva. There was Jerry and Ron. They knew her but they didn’t. People came and went. It was all very anonymous, perfect for getting shitfaced. The Holiday Inn was perfect for the same reasons. She got a room first so she could park the car and then she’d call Emmett. Emmett was the cabbie. He’d pick her up and drive her to the Bennigan’s. She drank Tanqueray and cranberry juice. Then she’d call Emmett to drive her back to the Holiday Inn. He worked twenty hours a day because something was nearly always wrong. He had bad teeth and an ulcer. He had high blood pressure. There were things in the future that needed fixing and things in the past that needed paying off. He couldn’t get insurance and he couldn’t pay for what the insurance would never cover. She had his cell number and on the rare occasion he wasn’t driving for the company he picked her up in his Chevy Lumina. He took care of her when she wasn’t able to take care of herself.
“Why are you doing this to yourself?” he asked her one night after helping her inside her room at the Holiday Inn.
“My husband.”
“Your husband?”
“My husband’s at home. Suffering.”
“Suffering what?”
“Suffering what?” she said. “Suffering what? Ha ha ha ha ha ha!” she roared. “HA HA HA HA HA HA!”
“Do you think this is helping him?” he asked when her laughter had finally died.
“It’s helping me,” she replied.
She failed him. She hadn’t fucked anyone, she hadn’t left him for someone new, but that was only because it was easier to drink. That’s all. With something to take a drink from, she could find the strength to care for him most of the time. But how hard was that? He was strapped to a bed. She could walk away whenever she wanted—and she did a lot of walking away. She got used to him screaming. It got so that with enough wine she could ignore him. She did a shitty job tending to his bedsores. She would fall asleep when she read out loud to him. She wasn’t in the room when he needed to talk. She kept more company with the wine. So she never left, big whoop. So she never fucked somebody else, so what?
When she wasn’t at the Bennigan’s, she moved through the house. She went from room to room feeling the massive crushing weight of it. She tried to remember why they had decided that they needed so much space. To raise Becka, of course—but how big did they expect the