For the Love of a Lush (Lush No. 2) (4 page)

"A few hours later we stopped in a gas station to grab some painkillers and food. He and Joss, the singer—his best friend—had gone into the bathroom at the gas station when I heard Joss yelling for me to help. I ran right into the men’s room, because Joss isn’t the kind of guy to ask for help, you know?"

Leanne smiles and rolls her eyes. She’s a woman. She knows the type.

"Joss was holding Walsh around the waist and Walsh was vomiting blood all over the floor of the bathroom—streams of it. It kept coming and coming. Joss was yelling at me to call 911, and Walsh was crumpled up, just retching. We thought he was going to die right there in front of us. Eventually, he stopped and passed out, Joss held him on the floor of the bathroom so he wouldn’t vomit more and choke while I went to flag down the ambulance. We checked him into rehab as soon as he was released from the hospital."

I sit back in my chair, exhausted, as I always am, from retelling the horror of that night. It seems that, no matter how many times I talk about it, no matter how far in the past it gets, I’ll never be able to think of it without feeling that surge in adrenaline, that fear that Walsh will be taken from me permanently. I’ve got the image of him in that bathroom etched in my brain forever, and when I look at it, I feel panicked, irrational, so scared I want to scream from it.

"And what are you hoping will happen while you’re here to see him?" Leanne asks as she stands and picks up my plate of half-eaten food and empty coffee cup. It’s like she knows I’ll never be able to eat more after describing Walsh’s rock bottom.

I stand too and look her in the eye, noticing that she hasn’t asked why Walsh and I aren’t still together. I guess she assumes it was because of his alcoholism, and she’s right, but not for the reasons she might think.

"I want him back," I say simply. "We’ve been together since we were fourteen years old. I love him, and I want him back, alcoholism and all."

She nods as she places the dishes in the sink. Then she turns to face me, leaning back against the counter. "What does he want?"

"He wants me to go away."

"Of course he does. Alcoholics always want the hard stuff to go away. That’s why they drink. They can’t help it. It’s how they’re wired."

"He still loves me," I say defensively.

She gives me a small smile. "Anyone who’s been in a room with the two of you can see that."

I relax a little, trying to soften my expression. I’ve been told that I’m sort of bitch a lot of the time. I’m trying to work on it.

"So, what are you going to do about it?" Leanne asks.

I pick up my purse from the floor where I set it down when I sat to eat. I sling it over my shoulder and try to hold my head high. "I’m going to stick around. I’m going to see him. I’m going to talk to him. I’m going to tell him how I feel until he agrees to give me another chance."

"Well," she tells me with a big grin on her face. "You’re going to need a place to stay then."

Walsh

A
FTER SEEING
Tammy, I head straight to the bunkhouse. I’m not surprised to find Mike waiting for me.

"You okay?" he asks as he shoves a paper bag at me, which I’m sure is full of food from Leanne. I set it down on the nearest flat surface, too keyed up to deal with eating right now.

"Yeah," I mutter, opening up my dresser drawer and digging through it.

I hear Mike sigh, but he knows he can’t do anything for me right now. My time in rehab made a couple of things really clear—I’m terrible at admitting my emotions, both to myself and others, and I have a very bad habit of surrounding myself with people who take care of my shit for me.

I hooked up with Joss when I was about seven. He was this quiet, thoughtful kid standing around on the playground, watching everyone else. I asked him to play a game of baseball and introduced him to some other guys, and we were inseparable after that. By the time we were twelve, he was orchestrating most things in my life, and I was happy to have him do it. He’d keep track of what homework I had, remind me which days I was supposed to ride the bus or get picked up from school, and help me talk to my parents when we wanted to do something we knew they weren’t going to allow.

At fourteen, I met Tammy. Somehow this synergy developed between Joss, Tammy, and me. Joss moved into handling those parts of my life that Tammy couldn’t, she took care of the rest, and my job was to be happy and fun. Tammy’s gorgeous and smart as hell, but she comes on pretty strong with most people. I’m one of the few who get to see her softer side. Joss is deep and broody. The two of them struggle to connect with people. They were usually pissing someone off or putting someone off. I was the point man, the easygoing guy who could get the three of us to fit in anywhere. In return, I got out of all responsibilities in life. I operated like a goddamned child, and they helped me live that way.

The problem came when I didn’t feel so easygoing and happy anymore, when I started to have days where I was tired of being the social butterfly or didn’t find it so easy to fit in everywhere. When I had feelings I didn’t know how to deal with. It became exhausting stuffing everything down all the time, continuing the happy-go-lucky façade I’d promised everyone.

That’s when I began to rely on the alcohol to help me fulfill my part of the unspoken bargain the three of us had. It took four months in rehab to sort some of the shit out, and Tammy and Joss went to some of those therapy sessions with me. The dysfunction of the three of us together was startling to learn, and it still sends waves of pain through my heart to this day.

Now, as I stand here in the bunkhouse of the Double A Ranch, Mike sitting on the small desk we share, watching me as I sift through socks and underwear in search of the list I need, I know that this new twist—the return of Tammy—is yet another challenge I’m going to have to take on myself. I finally get the piece of paper I need and turn to Mike.

"I gotta go see Ronny," I tell him.

"He’s in the barn waiting for you," he answers.

I scowl at him because he’s obviously already told Ronny what’s going on, helping me out when he shouldn’t.

"He ran into me after lunch and asked where you were, man. Honest. I didn’t hunt him down," Mike says, reading my mind.

I sigh. "Fine. Where are you off to?"

"The far north acreage to refill some water troughs and bring back a couple of calves the guys are going to vaccinate."

"All right. Maybe I’ll see you out there."

Mike stands up and gives me a handclasp. "Take care, brotha’."

I nod and head toward the barn.

A
S
I walk across the central parking area to the barn, I try not to think about Tammy’s rental car still parked here. What the fuck is she doing? Tammy’s not the type to go buddying up with other women, so I find it hard to imagine that she’s crying on Leanne’s shoulder. But then again, I haven’t seen Tammy in six months, so who the hell knows what she might do these days? What I do know is that having her so close is like my own personal siren song It’s all I can do not to head into the house just to get a glimpse of her, smell her, watch her. I scrub my hand across the back of my neck. I’m not sure at this point which of my two loves I’m longing for more—Tammy or booze.

I find Ronny in the barn, combing out a horse’s mane and singing some song in Spanish. He looks up as I walk in, and in his usual Ronny way, he tips his chin at me while continuing to work on the horse. He once told me that horses make him feel calm. Whenever he’s facing something stressful, he comes out to the barn so he can think while he deals with the horses.

I like the horses fine, but they’re fucking huge and, between the teeth and the hooves, not really my cup of tea. I sit on a bale of hay, and soon J.B. is rubbing up against my leg. I think she’s more my speed. I scratch her back as Ronny starts to talk.

"So she found you?"

"Yeah."

"You knew it’d happen sooner or later, right?"

"Yeah, I guess. It took so long I was starting to pretend it wasn’t going to though."

"What do you want to tell me about it?"

"I don’t
want
to tell you anything about it," I bitch. "I don’t
want
to talk about it at all."

I see the corner of Ronny’s lips turn up, and he glances at me sideways. "Yet here you are."

I sigh. I seem to be doing that a lot today. "Yeah. Here I am."

No one says anything for a couple of minutes as Ronny moves from the mane to the tail and murmurs sweet nothings to the horse, who looks like she’s in heaven with the attention.

I finally give in and tell Ronny what I have to. "She wanted to talk about everything that happened. Then she wanted to know if I still love her."

"And what did you tell her?" he asks.

"That it’s not worth talking because we hurt each other too much and it’s better to stay away from one another. I also told her that, as much as I hate it, I’ll always love her."

"So what’s next?"

This is the part of having Ronny for a sponsor that’s fucking tough. He asks lots of questions and provides very few answers. When I moved here to the ranch, I had to switch from my sponsor in Portland to Ronny, and I was thrown at first by his style, but I can see that it’s probably the best thing for me. He
makes
me talk to him and he doesn’t give me answers—exactly what I hate.

I pull the paper that was in my dresser out of my back pocket. "I think it’s time for step eight," I say, peering at the sheet.

Ronny nods. "Tell me about step eight."

I scratch my head. "I will ‘make a list of all persons I’ve harmed and be willing to make amends to them.’ I think I need to do that."

"You think?"

"I need to do that."

"Good. Who will be on that list?" He finally finishes with the horse and leads it back to its stall.

As he clucks to it and gets it settled inside, I think. When he comes back out, he stands in front of me, arms crossed as he looks down at me.

Quietly, he repeats, "Who’s on that list, Walsh?"

I stand up and start to pace, the paper in my hand like some sort of weight I can’t unload.

"Tammy."

"Go on."

Fuck, I hate this. "Joss," I growl.

"Who else?"

"My parents, Mike, Colin."

"Keep going," he instructs as I walk back and forth, my skin itching like I’ve got some sort of rash.

"Tammy’s parents and her sister, Mel. My sister, Annette, and her husband… Also, all the crew who worked for the band. And Dave, our manager."

"Okay. That sounds like a good start—"

"A start?!" I yelp. "It’ll take me the fucking rest of my life to track down all those people and apologize. Jesus, how could one person do that much damage?"

Right now I hate myself more than I normally do, and I feel defeated, utterly defeated. I sit back down on the bale of hay, my head in my hands.

Ronny squats on the ground in front of me. "Hey," he says, his deep voice vibrating through the still air of the barn. "You’re a human being. We all do damage every day we exist on this earth. We also all do good every day. It’s part of what being human means. We’re not pure, Walsh. Every one of us is a mixture of good and bad, selfish and selfless, and that’s why it comes down to the choices we make. When you chose alcohol, you chose poorly, and now you need to make amends for that, but you’re no better or worse than any other being on this planet."

I look up at him, seeing the calm that lies like a blanket over his features. It’s so hard for me to imagine that Ronny was once the kind of guy who’d go out and get blasted to the point where he’d wake up on a sidewalk somewhere twelve or fifteen hours later having screwed a random woman, gotten in a fistfight with her boyfriend, been tossed out of a bar at four a.m., and then passed out cold on the pavement.

I try to stop my knee that’s jiggling, and I clench my jaw to keep from grinding my teeth. This stuff is so fucking hard. I feel like I’m going to crawl out of my skin sometimes.

"You’re no better and no worse, Walsh," Ronny repeats.

"Okay," I nod, letting it settle into my mind, hoping it’ll take root eventually.