Other Broken Things (15 page)

My hand slides along the counter and up to the cast iron pots hanging on the wall. “You don't have a lot of stuff,” I say, noting how perfectly everything fits into this small space. There's a section that's walled off at the end of the trailer, which I assume is where his bed is.

“No. I don't need much.”

“Did you build this place?”

“Mostly. I had a guy help me with the electrics and some of the carpentry. But, yeah, I built it. I got the idea from an architect I know. She was trying to get out from under a mountain of messy divorce debt. She didn't want a house payment anymore. So she got a flatbed trailer and built herself a house for less than twelve grand. Sort of amazing, really.”

“It's small,” I say, twisting my hands in front of me. The space between Joe and me seems almost nonexistent. I'm hyperaware of every move he's making and I'm sure he's equally aware of me. I can almost feel his breath on my cheek.

“It's just me living here,” he says.

Silence sits between us, but it's not the usual comfortable silence of being with Joe. It's his waiting silence.

“I didn't call because I wanted to drink,” I finally say. “So I powered off my phone and got some vodka instead.”

“Yeah, I got that part.” He steps even closer to me and steers me toward the tiny table at the end of the counter. I sit and he slips into the chair opposite.

“I can't do my Fifth Step with Kathy.”

His brow furrows. “Why not?”

I shake my head. He doesn't know about his brother. Still. And telling him is going way past oversharing into crossing boundaries I don't want to get involved with. “It's not my place to say. But she's not in a good spot to help me with it.”

“I talked to her this morning when you didn't show up. She seems fine.”

“Look. You need to let it go. I don't want to tell her all my shit. Whether that's because of her or me is irrelevant. The point is, I'm not getting into it all with her.”

“You have to do it with someone,” he says.

I nod and look at him, searching his face for permission, for some sort of sign he understands what I'm feeling. “I can't do it with Kathy. I can't,” I say again.

He reaches across the table and takes my hand. “I won't be that person for you, Natalie. It's too . . . loaded. You know that.”

I do, but it doesn't change how I feel. “You're the only one I could tell,” I blurt out. “You're the only one who I think could know my whole truth and not judge me for it.”

He shakes his head. “We can't . . .”

“I'm not looking for epic love, Joe. All I want, all I really need, is someone who gives a shit about my story. Someone who cares enough to listen.”

The words are like pieces of me being pried from my body. I can't believe I've even said them. I have no idea how I got to this place from where I was last night. All I know is that I need him with a strange desperation. I
need
him. To listen and say it's okay and hold my hand and tell me that I'm going to make it and that maybe I'm not the worst person in the world.

“Please,” I whisper. “I won't get through it without you.”

The whole atmosphere in the room has changed. And I'm almost one hundred percent certain he's going to turn me away, send me home, back to the darkness.

“Okay,” he says at last. “Okay.”

Joe stands to get
an ashtray. It's one of those smokeless kinds, which is maybe why his tiny eco-trailer doesn't smell like cigarettes. I pull my pack from my purse and light one before I say anything.

“So how does it work?”

“Well,” he says, lighting his own cigarette, “there's no specific way. You can tell me how it was going through your moral inventory, what you figured out about yourself. Or you can tell me your story, weaving your moral inventory into it.”

“Kathy told me it's mostly about sex.”

Joe doesn't flinch but his hand shakes the tiniest bit as he flicks an ash. “Depends. It can be. It isn't for everyone.”

“Was it for you?”

He stares at me for a second and I'm worried I've already pushed too hard. Finally he says, “Yes and no. But this isn't my Fifth Step, it's yours. I'll answer your questions, but you and I both know that's just you stalling. So. Why don't you tell me what happened last night?”

I take a full drag. “No. I need to back up to before then.”

He nods.

“It's not like I didn't know about my addictive personality. I mean, I've always sort of been an all-or-nothing kind of girl. But I didn't really think it would happen with drinking. I mean, everyone in high school drinks, right?”

“Not everyone.”

I wave the hand holding my cigarette. “I'm not talking about the athletes in training or the losers who never go to parties. I'm talking about most people. And it's not just my circle. I bet at least three-quarters of my class have had a drink. Most of them probably had one by freshman year. Before I had loadie friends, I had regular friends and they all drank some, even the ones on the honors track. It's how things are these days.”

Joe blinks. “These days?”

“Fuck off. I'm not calling you old. I'm just saying that most people at my high school have had a drink. And probably most people in any high school. It's what teenagers do. And access is pretty easy.”

“Okay. So, you've been drinking since . . . ?”

I inhale deeply on my cigarette and end up coughing. “I had my first drink in sixth grade. It was at one of my parents' parties. But it wasn't a big deal. And that was the year I first started boxing.”

Joe smiles and part of me melts a little, but I shore up my defenses.

“So I didn't drink much because I boxed. And you know how I told you I got good after a few years, like really good, but my parents didn't want me to do it.”

He nods. “And?”

“And I gave it up for a while—the boxing—and started drinking a lot more. Because if I didn't, I think I probably would've ended up beating the crap out of everyone. The thing about boxing isn't just that I was good. It was that it belonged to me, you know? No one else does it. I mean, yeah, girls do it, but no one from my school, no one my parents know. It was all mine.”

“But you gave it up.”

I look up for a second. “Yeah. Because my parents told me to. They kept on me about it, telling me it could only be a hobby. Complaining about my bruises and how I didn't look like other girls. Making it hard for me to keep going. And I always fucking give up things that are too hard. But I missed it so much that after a while, I figured, fuck my parents, I'm going to get sober and do it anyway. But it was like everything was stacked against me, you know? It wasn't just having to quit drinking, which at that point, I figured I probably could. It was . . .”

I can't finish. There's a roadblock in the back of my throat that won't let me finish that line of thought, so I change direction. “By the beginning of last year I was drinking every day. My friends and I would take water bottles of powdered orange drink and vodka to school every morning. I think they added water too. I did at first, but by May it was just the vodka and the orange powder.”

I expect Joe to say something about me refusing to believe I was the same as all the other alkies when I first started AA, but he doesn't. He waits and lets me pull together my story. It's so easy with him.

“I didn't think it was that big a deal, is the thing. Because my friends were doing it with me. And yeah, I was drinking more. Drinking at home alone sometimes. Starting my weekends with V8 and vodkas. Not remembering parts of the nights when I'd go out and party.”

“And you didn't get the DTs when you were in rehab?” Joe asks.

I shake my head. “No. Maybe because I'm young. Maybe because it hadn't been going on for ten years like the other alkies. I don't know. I wanted to drink. I still do. Like I would peel off my own skin to be having this conversation over shots right now. But it's not all I want.”

“So it's not just rehab that got you to quit?”

I shrug. “Well, the court situation didn't help. And you know my dad installed a Breathalyzer on my car.”

“Natalie. I've been there. If you're at the peel-your-skin-off-for-a-drink stage, that's pretty far gone. Court cards and a car Breathalyzer aren't much of a deterrent. You proved that last night. So what was it? What did it? What made you at least want to try to quit for good? Because this is hard, and you told me that you don't hold on to things that are too hard. So why are you holding on to sobriety?”

I'm lighting my second cigarette as I say, “You trying to figure out my rock bottom? What pushed me to the point that I actually want to stay sober? I don't know. I don't think I have a real defining moment. No ‘Hey, Nat, get your shit together' come to Jesus. Staying sober is hard, but so is being drunk. That's why I'm not the same as you.”

“Not everyone hits rock bottom like that. Sometimes we just wake up and realize we're pretty broken and the only way out of the hole is up.”

“Are we already to that part of the half hour? The platitudes about working the program and believing in my higher power? You don't even want me to tell you about my crappy childhood or give you my poor-little-rich-girl sob story?”

He doesn't even smile. “Why do you do that?”

“What?”

“Why do you make it seem like you're not worth anything? Like your problems aren't important?”

“Because they're not. There are people starving in the world. People who have to live on the streets. People who grew up with single moms living on welfare.”

He reaches across the table and covers my hand with his. “Natalie. These things don't change how we feel. They don't change the holes inside us. They don't change our addictions.”

“But it's all stupid. My current problems exist because I drink. I made this crappy bed that I now have to lie in.”

“Maybe. Or maybe you started drinking to make your problems go away, and what really happened was they ended up just getting worse. Maybe your drinking was more about avoiding the hard stuff.”

I shrug and release a stream of smoke. The smokeless ashtray doesn't work that well, I'm noticing, which makes me think maybe Joe doesn't smoke inside that often.

“Should we go outside to smoke?”

“No,” he says. “It's freezing outside and I'm not going to sit out there for hours while you spill your life story just to prevent a lingering smoke smell. It'll be fine.”

“It won't take me hours to tell my story.”

He looks at the clock on his wall. “Thirty minutes so far and all you've really said is that you're good at boxing and you had a crappy childhood. But you haven't explained what that part means.”

I sigh. “Oh, you know. The same as everyone else. It was fine. I'm an only child. My parents' pride and joy. Except that's maybe not so true anymore. And I'm not sure how true it's ever been. Maybe with Mom. But I think that has more to do with the fact that she doesn't have a job, so there's nothing she can call her own beyond her role as wife and mother. But it's always been wife first. My dad is sort of a big shot at the Board of Trade.”

Joe nods. “And your mom has never worked?”

“She did before she had me. She worked at the library. But then I was a difficult baby—they remind me of this often—and I guess Mom couldn't really leave me with a babysitter for very long. She was sort of this crazy breast-feeder and I wouldn't ever take the bottle. My dad was mortified about the whole thing, but she held her ground. I don't know. It was a long time ago. And when I started eating real food, Dad got her back and turned her into this amazing trophy-wife hostess.”

Joe raises his eyebrow at this. “She doesn't seem like a trophy wife.”

“Well, not in that boob-job, plastic-surgery kind of way, but believe me, she has mad skills when it comes to taking up no space so there's plenty of room for the ego of Dad and all his trader buddies. You should see her when she's hosting. It's like she asks all the right questions, gets people to share their completely vapid life stories, without saying one thing about herself. From the outside, she has the emotional landscape of a rock garden.”

Joe laughs. “Well, rock gardens can be pretty elaborate if you're serious about the design.”

I light a third cigarette. “Yes, but they seem like nothing on the outside. That's Mom. She's so good at faking—at lying, really—that you'd never really know how unhappy she is unless you were in her shoes.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I live with him too. Because he told me to give up boxing and she didn't fight for me. And now . . . she says maybe I could have it back, but I just know he won't let me. And asking for it, wanting it, that seems really hard.”

“Yes, probably it will be. Especially if your dad doesn't want it for you.”

I nod. “Nothing else matters to him but what it looks like from the outside. That's why my boxing, my DUI, my rehab, even going to AA meetings is a huge fucking inconvenience for him. And he orders Mom around like she has no brain, like she can't pull off the simplest of tasks when she's been holding our family together forever.”

“So. This is resentment. Which must have been on your list. And now we're going to cross it off. And you're going to let this go.”

“I am?”

“Yes,” he says. “Because this is something, someone, you have no control over. Your dad has made his choices. They aren't the choices you would make. Same with your mom. But they don't belong to you. There is nothing you can do to change them. It isn't your responsibility. You want people to be better, but that can't be on you. The only person you can make better is you.”