The Ninth Step Read Online Free PDF Page B

he was so grateful when Anita answered that his eyes teared. She was relieved to hear from him, too, thrilled when he told her he was going to meetings. She didn’t really care about his lack of enthusiasm.
    She said, “Fake it ‘til you make it.”
    He told her about buying the car and that when he was driving, he felt free. He said, “Sometimes after work, I drive out of the city, go around on the county roads, get myself lost.” He faked a laugh. It was a lie; he was never lost. He’d found Livie’s house and gone there a half dozen times. He always waited until after dark and parked on the side of the road where the shadows were deepest. He rolled down his window, breathed air that carried remnants of the sun’s heat, fainter scents of manure and fresh-mown hay, a cooler glimmer of moonlight. He listened to the drone of cicadas and watched her lights wink out one-by-one and he was comforted to think of her safe and sleeping in that pretty little house. She had always wanted a place in the country. Back when they’d planned a life together, they’d hunted for property; they’d designed their home, a four-bedroom bungalow with a huge kitchen-living area and a deep porch on all four sides. The house Livie had now was older, early nineteenth century, and smaller, and the porch hugged the front, but there was a swing. She’d always wanted a front porch swing. At least she had that part of her dream.
    But there was no husband, or even the sign of a boyfriend. So far. Which both elated him and saddened him. If she was alone now, it had to be because of him, what he’d done to her. She probably hated men. Certainly she couldn’t trust them. And how could he fix that? With amends? He’d go up to her and say what? That he was sorry? Then presto, her faith in humanity would be restored? 
    “What about a sponsor,” Anita asked. “Have you found anyone?”
    Cotton sat on the end of the bed and said, “What if drinking’s not my problem?”
    “Ah geezus, Cotton, don’t start--”
    “No, listen, I know I’m a drunk now, but I wasn’t before. And the reasons I drink now aren’t physical. It’s not like I have a physical craving. I drink to cover up, to hide, to forget; it’s mental, psychological not--”
    “Physical, psychological, what difference does it make? Besides, you did drink before, often to excess--your words--you were drunk the night of your rehearsal dinner.”
    “So, I partied--” Cotton broke off, paced to the window that overlooked the alley. He could hear the drag of disapproval in Anita’s silence. He said, “I wrote to her again.”
    “Livie?”
    “Yeah. I emailed her.”
    “Since when did you get a computer?”
    “I didn’t. There’s an Internet café close to work.”
    “What did you say this time?”
    Cotton took a breath; he rubbed a line between his brows. “I told her I want to see her, that I have to.”
     

Chapter 3
     
    They were a hairdresser’s daughters, raised dirt poor, or the next thing to it. They’d grown up on McKowa Court in a low income neighborhood south of the loop in Houston in a tiny two-bedroom house with a narrow back stoop and a screen door that caught your heel every time it snapped shut. When Livie and Kat had played hopscotch out front, they’d incorporated the sidewalk cracks as part of the grid.
    Sometimes they’d gone with their mom to get food stamps. Their mom, Augustinia Saunders, Gus for short, who’d worked at Helen’s House of Hair, who’d logged long wearisome hours standing on her feet for a hairdresser’s wages: a miniscule salary plus tips. Kat had been made to wear Livie’s hand-me-downs that their mom had bought for Livie from the Second Hand Rose. They’d ridden the bus to get there.
    To buy used clothes, Kat had said, hate etched into the inflection of every syllable. Why can’t we ever have new? Go to the mall, be like normal people?
    She had nothing used now. Kat’s family barely sat on a sofa before she gave it away