by Kelly Irvin
Dangling a sweet carrot in front of her. He knew she’d never be able to resist a chance to be involved in this investigation. “I’ll pack my bag, but I’m only staying until they catch Slocum.”
“Good choice.”
She stood. Dad grabbed her hand. “Spare a hug for your old man?”
“You’re not old.” She swooped down and hugged him hard. “Sorry for being a pain in your rear.”
“You’re your mother’s daughter, sweetie.” He planted a hard peck on her cheek. “And that’s a compliment.”
The best compliment possible. Teagan fled.
13
Hello, my dear friends. How I’ve missed you.
The aroma of spilled beer and fresh cigarette smoke tickled Max’s nose. Like a peculiar brand of air freshener manufactured just for people like him. He slid onto a stool at the bar and eyed the bottles of booze that lined the wall behind it. Wild Turkey had always been his favorite. Johnnie Walker Black next. Then Crown Royal. A shot of Patrón Silver tequila chased with Corona. He liked variety. Not on the same night, of course. That only worsened the hangover. He chose his poison and stuck to it. He was a drunk, but he was a smart drunk.
Four o’clock and the Biker Blues Bar on Loop 1604 West across from the UTSA campus verged on comatose. Two guys in black leather vests and baggy jeans, sporting long leather key chains and bandannas turned into headbands played pool. The dozen longneck Corona bottles lined up on the table suggested they’d been at it for a while.
A woman in jean shorts and a sagging tank top bent over a vintage jukebox, her hands thrumming to the beat of an ancient Creedence Clearwater Revival tune. She had the leathery skin of a sun worshiper. A couple sucked face in a booth by the door, oblivious to the people around them grossed out by their ecstatic PDA.
The tune took Max back to the days in high school when he’d worked on his first car in the garage while his dad, who loved classic rock, sat in a beach chair giving him life pointers.
“Never kiss a girl on the first date. She’ll think you’re after one thing and one thing only.”
“Dad! Things aren’t like they were forty years ago when you started dating Mom.”
“Being a gentleman never goes out of fashion.”
Two years in and Max still hadn’t kissed Teagan. Friends didn’t kiss. Dad wouldn’t understand his son’s relationship with Teagan. Max didn’t understand it himself.
However, he had thrown her to the asphalt on a busy downtown street for no reason other than a car backfiring.
“What’ll it be?” The bartender, a heavyset man in a Metallica T-shirt pulled tight over broad shoulders and a flat belly, wiped his hands on a dish towel and dropped it on the bar. “It’s happy hour. Two for one.”
Happy hour had once been Max’s favorite time of day. “A large Sprite with lots of cherries and lime. Extra ice.”
The guy’s black unibrow did a dance, but he smiled and nodded. “Coming right up, buddy.”
Max dug his seven-year chip from his jean pocket and laid it on the scarred pine bar. He picked it up and spun it. At first he’d gone to meetings every day, sometimes twice a day. He hated them, right up there with the twice-weekly sessions with his therapist after the suicide attempt. They were like pouring rubbing alcohol in an open wound. Every meeting reminded him he couldn’t control himself. He couldn’t fix himself. Gradually the routine became a comfort. He had a place to go. A place to be. With other broken human beings willing to say it out loud. We can’t control ourselves, but God can.
“My wife has one of those chips.” The bartender slapped a napkin in front of Max and placed the soda on it. “Takes a lot of willpower to get one. Are you sure you’re in the right place?”
“Just visiting old friends.”
“If you need anything else, let me know.” He shrugged. “I hope you don’t, but it is a bar. My lady has started over twice.”
“How far is she now?”
“Two months and two days. Her longest stretch was four years, three months.”
“But she keeps trying.” Max squeezed the juice from the lime slice and inhaled the clean citrus scent. “That’s what counts.”
“She knows we can’t be together if she drinks. I won’t leave the kids with her.”
“She doesn’t mind you working in a bar?”
“I’m not an alcoholic. A couple of beers during the big game and I’m done. This is what I do. I own the dump. It’s how I met her.”
It made about as much sense as anything else in this screwed-up world. “I’ll pray for y’all.”
“I appreciate that.” The bartender moved on to an old fart with a ZZ Top beard at the end of the bar who had been trying to wave him over for most of the conversation.
Max bit into a maraschino cherry and savored the sweetness. He dropped the stem on the napkin and took a swig of soda. The fizz burned his throat and his nose. The heady sweet drink did nothing to slake his thirst.
He closed his eyes and breathed, concentrating on the sounds. The smack of cue stick against ball, ball against ball, the classic rock ’n’ roll that pounded with a quivering bass through massive speakers, and the baseball game on the flat-screen TV over the bar. The click of ice poured into glasses. The hiss of the AC. The sounds pulsed louder and louder. His head pounded.
When he first got sober, he’d missed the bars almost as much as the alcohol. The camaraderie, the loose, easy feeling after a scotch on the rocks or two that he and his friends could talk all night about everything and nothing. Politics, religion, life, death, love, family, and everything that kept a guy up at night. The cacophony drowned out the screams of a dying twenty-year-old whose legs had been blown from his torso.
Drowned out the feeling that nothing really mattered.
The slide toward oblivion had been easy. Even enjoyable.
He took another sip of soda. His stomach protested. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast.
To have a drink now would be the most abject kind of selfishness. Teagan needed him, even if she wouldn’t admit it. The kids at church needed him. Rick had taken a chance on him.
One shot of Jose Cuervo. One Heineken. Just enough to take the edge off.
The lie every alcoholic told himself.
His parched throat ached. His hands shook. Just the imagined scent of the old man’s gin and tonic made Max light-headed.
He fumbled for his phone. Jabbed the number in his Favorites. Damon answered in that deep, mellow, jazz-DJ voice on the first ring. “Hey, Bro, what’s up?”
“It’s been a day.”
“That kind of day?”
“Yeah.”
“Where are you, man?” His AA sponsor’s tone didn’t change. Damon was a 240-pound former NFL tackle who lost his dream job because of drinking. He now raised goats, hogs, and horses and grew vegetables on a hundred-acre spread in the Hill Country. “I hear music.”
Max named the bar.
“Did you drink?” The question held no judgment. Damon was in information-gathering mode.
“No, but this looks like the day. Any excuse looks good.”
“What happened today?”
Max offered the salient details of his meltdown.
“It’s been a long time since you had a flashback that severe. Do you know what brought it on?”
He didn’t want to get into it on the phone. “It doesn’t really matter. I knocked the woman I love to the ground in the middle of the street like we were in the mountains of Afghanistan. I hurt her.”
Damon knew about Teagan. He was an expert at excavating information. “Do me a favor and walk outside. Get some fresh air. I’ll be there in ten.”
“No. You don’t have to come.”
“I want to come. It’s my job as your sponsor.”
“I just needed someone to give me a verbal slap upside the head.”
“I’m not doing that. You don’t deserve verbal abuse for being human.” Damon’s voice remained as smooth as vanilla pudding. “Let’s take
a meeting together.”
“I’ll meet you there.”
“Are you sure? It’s no problem for me to swing by and pick you up.”
“Then you’ll have to bring me back here to my truck.” Which would be conveniently parked at a bar. “Meet me there.”
“You got it, friend. If you don’t show up on time, I’m coming for you and it won’t be pretty.”
“I’m leaving now.” Max hung up first. Phone still gripped in one hand, he slid from the stool and inhaled the aroma of oblivion one more time.
He swallowed the last of the soda and slapped a ten on the bar. His chip lay next to the damp napkin. Max picked it up and wrapped his fingers around it.
It felt light yet solid.
One day at a time. One hour at a time. One minute at a time. That’s how he’d gotten through those seven years.
That’s how he would get through the next seven years. One minute at a time.
14
Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. The old Monopoly game admonition sang in Max’s head as he trudged up the steps to the portable building on the edge of Faith and Hope Community Church’s parking lot. Damon’s lemon-yellow Mustang hadn’t appeared yet. This group met in the portable because it allowed participants a place to smoke under the overhang. It used to be they could smoke in the ten-by-twenty room where the meetings were held. Even that became an issue. The church elders didn’t want to put any more obstacles in the way of these people’s sobriety, but they couldn’t have smoking inside their facilities. Even in this dank room that smelled musty and like the old clothes they used to sort here for the church’s homeless outreach.
Today the aroma of coffee mingled with the less desirable odors. Max needed caffeine. Maybe it would assuage the desire for a drink. Not likely. Only death could do that. He filled a Styrofoam cup, bypassed the obligatory donuts, and settled into a folding chair in the circle. The facilitator liked the circle. Nobody could hide in the back row. At least that meant they didn’t have to stand and walk to the front of the room to do their sharing.
A woman in faded blue jeans, a retro hippies-style peasant blouse short enough to reveal a belly button ring, and pink Converse sneakers hesitated in front of him. “Is this seat taken?”
“Nope. Help yourself.”
She smelled like patchouli, orange, and cardamom. A nice clean scent not easily overpowered by the mustiness of the room. Max leaned back and tried to relax. Maybe there was something to the aromatherapy craze the girls in youth group talked about.
“I’m Charity.” She held out her hand. Max shook it. Her firm grip didn’t match her thin, almost frail, frame. She had light-brown eyes and long brown hair. “I just made my thirty days.”
“Congratulations. I’m Max.” He didn’t share that he had seven years in the rearview mirror. One more minute at the Biker Blues Bar and tomorrow he’d be thirty days behind Charity. “I haven’t seen you here before.”
“My first time at this one.” She tugged the strap of a leather bag that could’ve served as luggage for a long trip from her skinny shoulder and plopped the purse on her lap. “I moved to this area last week. It’s closer to UTSA. I’m a graduate student. I’m doing my thesis on alcoholism and the dysfunction of the creative mind.”
“So you figured you needed to gather data?”
She fingered a dainty gold hummingbird hanging from a gold necklace and giggled. “No, there’s a ton of famous writers and artists who were drunks. I just like to drink.”
“Welcome to the club.”
Damon plopped his Humvee-sized body into the chair on the other side. Whoever arranged them never allowed for a man big enough to lead the league in quarterback sacks four years running. His oversized presence and clean scent of aftershave provided the same odd sense of security it always did. “What’s shaking, dude?”
Max fisted his hands so the tremors wouldn’t show. “Life in the fast lane.”
He jerked his head toward Charity and made the introduction. The two shared nods and relaxed into their seats without further ado.
The group facilitator, a wheezy man who always had coffee stains on the one-size-too-small polo shirts he favored, called the meeting to order. He asked who wanted to start.
Max did not. He never wanted to share. Sharing was a lesson in humility. So he did. “I will. Hi, I’m Max, I’m an alcoholic.”
“Hi, Max.”
Without naming names or revealing the gory details, he sketched an outline of the last two days. “It kills me that my first reaction is to want a drink. I’m not stupid. I know that will never go away. I know how it would disappoint my friends. I know I would likely lose my job. I need to get over it. Suck it up.”
He shut his mouth and studied his hands. His knuckles were white.
Charity nudged him with her elbow. “Good job.”
“Thanks.”
Damon’s gaze held empathy. “One day at a time, bud.”
The hour passed in a litany of similar admissions. Not that anyone else dealt with life-threatening situations involving murder, but every participant had a cross to bear that his buddy Beelzebub said would be easier to bear if he simply gave in and had a drink.
They stood, held hands, and ended the session as they always did with the Serenity Prayer.
According to Bill W., cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, the key to sobriety was giving up control. Max agreed. He didn’t like it, but he agreed. Which made his predilection for pills and booze so hard to understand. His parents, both gone for a few years now, had assured him that no history of alcoholism existed in his family. Nope, it was on him.
He stretched. Every bone in his body ached. Damon wandered off toward the coffeepot. Charity stood closer than she should. “That was good.”
“You didn’t share.”
“Just getting the lay of the land. Maybe next time. I’m sorry about your friend. That sucks. If you ever want to talk, I’m available. We could grab a cup of coffee. Lunch. I’m a good listener.” She leaned in. Her collarbones stuck out. “I know a lot of meditation and massage techniques that can help you relax.”
Max stumbled back. His sneaker smacked against a chair. He flailed to keep from landing on his rump. “I’ll keep that in mind. I’m more into boxing at the gym and running. I work on my truck. Sweat a lot. You might talk to the facilitator, though. He can help you find a sponsor, if you want.”
“I have a sponsor. I don’t want to give him up.”
Max’s Spidey senses tingled. “Your sponsor is a he? I’m surprised. They don’t recommend that. It’s really frowned upon.”
An ugly brick red crept across her porcelain cheeks. “I know, I mean, don’t say anything. He’s been great and there’s nothing going on there.”
Nothing didn’t usually result in a flush of embarrassment. And something else. Something that looked distinctly like fear. “Hey, it’s none of my business.” It wasn’t, but the youth minister in him wouldn’t shut up. “Just be careful, okay? There’s a reason for that rule. There are three or four women in this group who would make great sponsors.”
“Naw, not necessary. My sponsor’s a saint, I promise.” She grabbed the suitcase-slash-purse and brushed past him. “See you around.”
Her tone suggested not-if-I-see-you-first. A 360-degree turn. From heat to ice in fifteen seconds flat.
“See you.”
“She seems nice.” Damon sipped his coffee and checked his smartwatch. “Let’s grab a taco at Tink-A Tako. We haven’t talked in a while. You can fill me in on what’s really bothering you. I’ll drive.”
“Murder and mayhem isn’t enough?” Knowing Damon as he did, Max didn’t bother to put up a fight. They hit their favorite hole-in-the-wall taco place, gorged on one too many tacos de carne guisada con queso on corn tortillas with fresh salsa. By the time he finished venting about his feelings for Teagan, Max felt somewhat better. Damon listened, didn’t offer clichés, and whistled at the appropriate times.
&nbs
p; “It’s enough to drive a guy to drink.” He chortled and threw his long, beaded dreadlocks over his shoulder. “If we can’t laugh, we have to cry, right?”
“And I want her to be happy.” Inhaling the aromatic scent of grilled jalapeños and onions, Max shredded his napkin over a plate empty except for a few sprigs of cilantro. “And safe. I want her to be safe. She’s right not to trust me. If I confront the issue, I could end our friendship. If I don’t, I may never know for sure why she won’t take things to the next level.”
“That’s between you and her. I don’t give advice to the lovelorn.” Damon had five kids he rarely saw because of two divorces. Five reasons he’d spent five years swimming in whiskey sours. “Instead of going to a bar, head to that church of yours. Pray about it, if that helps. That’s all I’m saying.”
AA might be faith based, but Damon had so far rebuffed any attempt Max made to talk to him about Jesus. “You’re right. I had a weak moment.”
“The way I see it, you had a strong moment. You didn’t drink. Congratulations.”
Perspective ruled. “Thank you.”
“Now get your behind home and get some sleep. The sunrise is guaranteed to knock your socks off. Another thing that God of yours did right. No matter what happens, you have a good friend in Miss Teagan. With all the people in this entire universe, you met her. What are the chances?”
Before Max could respond, Damon swept up the bill and lumbered to the counter to pay. They said their good-byes in the church parking lot with Damon demanding a promise that Max would call him next time, before he stepped into the bar rather than after.
Max dug his keys from his pocket and trudged to the truck. From the church it was a simple hop-skip-jump to Loop 1604. From there he could hit Bandera Road, aka Highway 16, and head north. At this time of night traffic would have dissipated from the gridlock that persisted throughout the day on the thoroughfare through San Antonio’s fastest-growing neighborhoods.
He cranked up The Message Sirius XM when Mandisa began belting out “Unfinished.” That was him. A work in progress. He would always be a work in progress. Which meant Teagan could never trust him. Trust was the foundation of any relationship. Could he subject her to more scenes like the one downtown earlier in the day? Could she trust him to stay sober year after year? How could she trust a drunk with her heart?
