The Next Right Thing Read Online Free PDF Page B

sometimes,” Terry said, “when a guy starts slacking off on meetings. His asshole starts to get tight.”
    I hadn’t been going to as many meetings as I used to, and when I did go, I wasn’t hanging out for endless hours in coffee shops afterward. For many years, I’d had no home but A.A. That year I’d discovered that I also had a home with MP. “If you don’t think I’m going to enough meetings, Terry, why don’t you just say so?”
    “Am I your sponsor now?”
    “Yes, in fact, you
are
my sponsor.”
    “Well, fancy that.”
    “Okay,” I said. “I haven’t been going to enough meetings. What did I miss?”
    “You mean besides a feeling of peace and connection to your fellows?”
    “Yeah,” I said, “besides that.”
    “This whole eco-friendly recovery-home thing seems to be taking off.”
    “The what?”
    “Colin Alvarez has this idea that he can squeeze a few morebucks out of the newcomers if he puts some solar panels on his recovery homes. The man’s a marketing genius.”
    I laughed. I laughed hard. “Since when do you applaud Colin Alvarez?”
    “Where have you been? How come you don’t know what’s been happening in your own community? You think you don’t matter, that you can go off and fall in love with yoga girl, and it won’t leave a vacuum in A.A.? But it does leave a vacuum, and this is what’s filling it: low-carbon-imprint fucking recovery homes.”
    “Look at my face”—I pointed to myself—“this is me being contrite. I’m fucking sorry. I’ll see you at the meeting tonight.”
    I did go that night, but I don’t think I went the next night.

    Despite my desire for answers, I wasn’t quite ready to call everyone I knew and ask about an electrician named after a dog. And, one way or another, I knew I’d be seeing John Sewell, my ex-wife’s new beau and erstwhile employer of the mystery electrician, soon enough. It was midmorning, and I decided I’d better help Yegua clean out my garage. Helping him do anything was my most valued form of procrastination.
    Yegua, my illegal alien assistant, smiled and flashed his teeth. I’d bought him those teeth myself, and he liked to remind me of my investment. My other laborers had given him the name Yegua—Spanish for “mare”—because there was a time between no teeth and new teeth when he had temporaries.
Large
temporaries.
    We started tying all my electrical cords into neat bundles,which always made me wonder why I had so many electrical cords.
    Yegua didn’t have a green card, though he’d been working for me almost the whole time I’d been working myself. Always casually but impeccably dressed—even his jeans were ironed—he had lately grown his wiry black hair out into a mullet. Sometimes I mimed scissors and threatened to cut it off. I told him that women would like him better with shorter hair. Yegua always said he needed only one woman in Guatemala and one woman here. And both of them liked his mullet.
    Yegua had put two sons through college in Guatemala, where he owned a business with a third. He was a better man than any man I knew. I guess I could have asked him whether he thought I was a racist, but I didn’t have the Spanish for the question. And I guess deep down I wasn’t prepared for the answer.
    He finished coiling another cord, then took mine, too. I wasn’t doing a very good job, and he started over. He hung them from hooks under the cabinets.
    “Somebody’s
buscándote
,” Yegua said. “
Tiene mala pinta
. He sits in the truck, watches your house. I thought it was one of your
camarades
, but now I don’t think so.”
    Yegua was amused by the A.A. guys, like Wade, who came by to shoot the shit. He probably thought they were “bad paint jobs,” too. There wasn’t an ounce of bullshit in Yegua—when the couple next door adopted a baby from China, I couldn’t convince him that the child hadn’t been purchased. I thought about the truck parked across the street, and the bad paint job who sat