“I’m not trying to scare you,” said Mrs. Dale. “But I know what this looks like. And I know it can happen to anyone. The nicest people. The smartest people. My niece was so beautiful. You’d never look at her and think that she was a drug addict. She was just taking what the doctors gave her. Right until she died.”
“I appreciate what you’re saying, but that’s not me. I don’t have a problem.” Never mind the surveys I’d taken, the questionnaires I’d filled out, the increasing number of pills I needed to get through the day. Never mind the promises—not before nine, not before noon, not while I’m working, not when I’m with Eloise—that I’d broken, one after another, every day, stretching back for months. “I don’t. I just made a mistake today, and you were right to take my keys, and I swear, I swear on my daughter’s life, that it’ll never happen again.” I took a gulp of lukewarm coffee and forced myself to ask, “Are you going to report me?”
After an interminable pause, Mrs. Dale shook her head.
“Thank you. I’m sorry. I promise . . . I swear to you,” I repeated, “this will never happen again.”
She gazed at me, and her eyes, behind her bifocals, looked kind. “There’s no shame in asking for help if you need it,” she said . . . and then she walked out, leaving me alone with my coffee, and my keys.
I waited until she was out the door before I shoved my hand in my purse and touched the Altoids tin, then the prescription bottles, one, two, three, four. I had pills halfway to my mouth before something inside me, the little voice of reason, rose up and demanded, What the FUCK are you doing?
I put the pills back. I put the cap on the bottle. I put the bottle in my purse, and laid my head on top of my folded arms . . . and then, alone in the empty classroom, I started to cry.
THIRTEEN
The next morning, I didn’t take a single pill. I dropped Ellie off at school, treated myself to an extra-hot latte with a double shot of espresso, and then drove to Center City, pulled on oversized sunglasses and a baseball cap and slipped through the side door of the church on Pine Street I’d found online the night before. In the basement, about twenty people, most of them men, sat in folding metal chairs. Tattered posters were thumbtacked to the walls. One read “The Twelve Steps” and the other “The Twelve Traditions.” In the front of the room was a wooden desk with two more folding chairs behind it and a sculpture of the letters AA carved out of wood on top, along with a battered-looking three-ring binder and a basket. I pulled my baseball cap low, flipped my collar up, and took the seat closest to the door. The chairs began to fill, until there were almost fifty people in the room.
I looked around, dividing the attendees into categories: Aged Homeless (lots of layers of dirty clothes, and not many teeth) and Young Punks (pale, white, wormy Eminem clones in obscene T-shirts and with multiple piercings). There were old guys in Phillies jackets you’d pass on the street without a second look, and a single woman in a business suit with gold hoop earrings and leather pumps that I knew couldn’t have cost less than five hundred dollars, but it was mostly a collection of people who looked nothing like me.
“This seat taken?” asked a young man—maybe a teenager—in a blue T-shirt. When I shook my head, he sat down, swiped at his nose, and gave the pimple on his chin a squeeze. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” I said back. He had a ring through his nose that made me think of Ferdinand the bull; Ferdinand, who didn’t want to fight, just sit and sniff the flowers. I glanced at my phone—five minutes until this thing kicked off—and continued my appraisal. The crowd was mostly made up of men, but in the back of the room I spotted two more women, both in their fifties or sixties, looking like, as Dave’s frat buddy Dan might have said, they’d been ridden hard and put away wet. One of them had unnaturally blonde hair pulled into a high ponytail that went uncomfortably with her weathered face. The other was a brunette with gaudy earrings and a phlegmy cough. The blonde wore sweatpants, the brunette, a pair of high-waisted jeans and a mock turtleneck, à la Jennifer Aniston, circa Friends, season one. To pass the time, I made up jobs for them. The blonde was a cashier at a gas station; the brunette waited tables at a diner. Not a hipster diner with Pabst Blue Ribbon on tap and a legitimate chef using artisanal ingredients in the kitchen, either, but a grungy place somewhere in Northeast Philadelphia, where the mashed potatoes came from a box, where truckers and cabdrivers and construction workers came to eat meatloaf and play Patsy Cline on the jukebox.
“First time?”