Laird? What about him?

He came into some money. I’m talking a lot. Inheritance, I think.

Laird?

Twenty-one grand, man. Twenty-one-and-then-some grand. He’s fat, I’m telling you.

Laird? Twenty-one grand? Bullshit.

He’s got it on him. Showed me the check this morning. He’s showing everybody. You know how Laird is.

I watch the reflection of my face swell and shrink in Pete’s sunglasses.

Yeah, I know how Laird is.

Twenty-some-odd grand, I’m telling you Pete.

You for real?

Serious as a heart attack, Pete.

What’s it matter? Why’re you telling me this?

I want Laird to pick up the slack. I’m tired of giving you all my money.

Pete forces out a half laugh but he’s not smiling. He doesn’t take his eyes off me. His raw smoker’s breath jet-fueled by the funk of his coat stifles my face. Not doing his little speed freak bopping moves. Not doing anything but trying to slow his nerves down enough to think from A to B to C. He knows if he rolls Laird, he can go to any check-cashing place and get money.

Pete turns away and goes to cross the street but hangs back a little, head down like he’s concentrating on his shoes. Ross and John watch him, know something’s up. Pigeons rise from the sidewalk toward what little sunlight is beginning to penetrate the fog. The noise they make crashes down on my head like unfurling rolls of carpet. I don’t move.

I can’t say if Pete will bite or not, but he’s sure thinking about it. Check-cashing places don’t require ID. They take a 20 percent cut, no questions asked. Pete’s doing the math. He doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out. He knows he would have seventeen thousand dollars and some change in his pocket just like that.

I think it’s a good bet he’ll roll Laird for his check. Except there won’t be a check. I don’t know what I’ll do when Pete, Ross, and John beat the crap out of Laird and then realize he doesn’t have a dime on him.

I do know that Laird’ll be laid up and in too much pain to do any talking about us owing Martin more money than we paid him. And Raymond? If he really does help Martin get another bank account and then finds out that there’s no check coming from McGraw?

Well, that’ll be a problem too. It definitely will.

I’ll tell him something.

Katie

Her name was Gloria Gonzalez, but we always called her Mrs. G, although I’m sure she wouldn’t have minded if we’d called her Gloria. She owned La Taqueria, a Mexican restaurant up the street from Fresh Start. There was something about her—her thick white hair; her stooped shoulders, and the grooved worry lines in her face; the determined way she moved from table to table, wiping them clean, adjusting the plastic tablecloths; how she stood alone in the kitchen over the food-spattered stove, sweating, stirring pots of beans and rice, warming tortillas wrapped in tinfoil one by one—that gave me the impression of someone who had worked hard for years and had grown old because of it, unlike most of us who had aged by wasting our lives drinking. And because of that, I think we all thought she deserved nothing less than the respect of being called Mrs. G, someone who had taken life on and done something with it instead of hiding behind a bottle. But some people, like Hank, played her. Not because he disrespected her. Just the opposite. He liked her. But he was an alcoholic. He wasn’t drinking then, but he still thought in a street way. I’m not judging him. My sponsor, Stacey, would’ve jumped me for doing anything close to that. I’m just saying that one thing leads to another is how I see it, and eventually it did.

Mrs. G had a smile that filled her face, but she had a sad look about her too, which told us, or at least me, that she’d lost people in her life. I understood that. When I sobered up and began working the steps, the hardest one I had to deal with was the fourth, the one where you make amends. I wanted to apologize to my mom and dad for my drinking, but they had passed before I cleaned up. When I first got sober, Stacey suggested I write letters to them and then burn the letters and watch the ashes float into the air rising to heaven, a symbolic way of reaching them and others I’d hurt and who were no longer here. I looked at her like she was nuts. Symbolism is sort of horseshit, she admitted, but sometimes horseshit works.

I wrote the letters. It was hard. I tried to explain why I did what I did when I’d been drinking, what was going on in my head, but after a while I realized there was no way to explain it other than I’m an alcoholic and will always be one, except now, unlike then, I’m not drinking—one day at a time. I’m sorry for all the ways I hurt you, I wrote to each of them, I mean it. Love, Katie. I hoped that was enough. Sometimes less is more, Stacey told me. We were sitting in the backyard of her house with glasses of Coke. I held the letters over a grill and lit them with a lighter. The edges of the paper turned orange, curling into black ash. Thin white smoke rose and disappeared. I started crying, feeling the absence of my folks, my body clean of booze but my heart filled with this ache of missing them. I’m sorry, I said, again and again. Stacey held me, and I wanted to believe that she was my mom and dad and a whole bunch of other people I’d hurt, all of them hugging on me, but I could only take this symbolic crap so far. It was just Stacey, and I was grateful but it wasn’t near enough. She couldn’t make up for all of them who were gone and owed an apology. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe they wouldn’t have accepted my apology. Hank told me when he tried to apologize to his family, his stepdad slammed the door in his face. If my real dad had been around it would have been different, he said, but he left when I was a kid.

I don’t know about that, any more than I know if people go to heaven or hell. I hope my folks went to heaven and saw the smoke from the letters and know how sorry I am. Not that they were saints. They drank and owe me more than a few amends, but they aren’t here and I am. They can’t write letters where they’re at, Stacey reminded me. She was right. I stopped drinking, they didn’t, and I’m alive so it was on me to apologize, and I’m glad I did but I feel incomplete. Like there’s more to be said. Like I need to hear something from them even though I know I can’t. The Big Book talks about humility. Be mad and keep drinking, or be humble and let things go and stay sober. We all have to learn to forgive people who never tell us they’re sorry, Stacey told me. No one said it’d be easy.

I think Mrs. G understood me, like she knew I carried the same kind of sadness she did. I’d come into her place for lunch and she’d pat me on the shoulder and with that tired smile of hers she’d say, La vida mejorará, Katie, and then she’d repeat it in English: Life will get better, Katie. I always picked a corner table across from a painting of a ship on the ocean under a clear sky. Sailfish jumped out of the water and people on the boat faced them. I wondered where the ship was and where it might be headed.

Mrs. G opened La Taqueria about a year or so ago. Before she moved in, it had been a fast-food burger joint and before that a coffee and doughnut shop. Those places closed because too often the owners extended credit to formerly homeless people, recovering addicts like me, who worked at one of the social services agencies around here, including Fresh Start, assuming, I guess, that since they had jobs, they’d be good for it, but many weren’t. Too many. An addict with credit, even one who is in recovery but still thinks in the street way, doesn’t look at it like they owe money. Instead, they feel they got a break, conned the system, and have money to spend on something else and maybe get that on credit too.

I remember Mr. Papier, the owner of the burger place, coming into Fresh Start and speaking to Tom about the money owed to him by some of the staff. I could tell this kind of BS beat Tom down. He told everyone to pay their bills. Some of them did but most didn’t, and Tom couldn’t make them. It was between them and Mr. Papier. Eventually, Mr. Papier shut down just like the coffee and doughnut shop had. I can’t say he closed because staff at Fresh Start and the other agencies didn’t pay their bills, but it didn’t help, I’m sure.

I never fell into the credit trap. I know me. I don’t even have an ATM card. I’m a cash-only kind of gal. I don’t owe anyone. It’s a hassle going to the bank to withdraw money so I don’t spend much of what I take out, which is a good thing because I don’t have much to spend. It’s not like I earn a fortune at Fresh Start. But once, twice a week I’d go to Mrs. G’s as a treat to myself. It got so she knew what I wanted without me having to say anything. Chicken taco plate? she’d say to me when I walked in. You got it, I’d say. She’d carry it out on a big platter and warn me that it was very hot. It smelled all kinds of good, and I’d poke at the refried beans and yellow rice with a fork to let the heat out of it. If it was a slow day, Mrs. G would sit with me and tell me about her childhood in Puerto Rico. She’d spread her arms to show me how big the palm trees were and how she learned to crack open coconuts as a little girl and drink the milk inside. She said the ocean was so clear you could see all sorts of fish—just like in that painting I liked, and she’d point to it—and chickens would roam the beach and she’d chase them with her friends. When she went back into the kitchen, I’d look at the painting and imagine her looking at the water or running on the beach after chickens, and then I’d try to see myself and I’d laugh at the idea of me trying to catch chickens.

I warned Mrs. G not to give credit to anyone at Fresh Start when she first opened, and she didn’t. Then some of her Fresh Start regulars whined about being broke, and she’d feel bad for them. That’s how it started. She told me when she was growing up no one had much money and everybody helped each other, and I think she kind of looked at her customers the same way, as neighbors in need. Give it to me tomorrow, Mrs. G would say, and tomorrow would come and they wouldn’t have it. Give it to me tomorrow, she’d say again, and the next day they’d come up with another excuse and she’d give them another break until she was in it so deep it was like, You already owe me so much, what’s another ten dollars? I think she got caught up in her own screwy thinking.

When it came to not paying, Hank was one of the worst. He owed Mrs. G I don’t know how much. He was smooth. Oh, Mrs. G, can you give me a burrito just this once? I haven’t eaten all day. I promise I’ll pay my bill tomorrow, and she’d give him this look like she knew it was a lie, but she’d give it to him. Hank had it going on with her because he could make her laugh. She was married, her husband worked with her sometimes, but he had his own little lawn business and wasn’t around much. Hank didn’t care. He flirted with her, husband or no husband, and some of the things he’d say would make her blush red as a tomato. You know Mrs. G, he told her one afternoon, it ain’t the size of the spoon but how you stir the batter, and he faced her and swiveled his hips in front of everyone in there and then he stepped around the counter and into the kitchen and kissed her on the cheek. I swear she was like a teenager, she got so flustered.

His charm didn’t linger once he left. Mrs. G would complain to me about him and I’d tell her I was so sorry he was doing her like he was, but she had to quit being so nice to him. Then I’d get on him about his bill. You gotta pay the woman, I told him. I’m tired of apologizing for you. Don’t worry about it, Katie, he’d say. I’ll handle it. But he never did. He shouldn’t have even been here. He’d left Fresh Start for a job at Walmart but he didn’t last long and Tom hired him back. He said he hadn’t fit in at Walmart. His coworkers would invite him to a bar after work and he’d have to explain that he didn’t drink. They’d ask him where he had worked before, and he’d tell them about Fresh Start and how it was the only steady job he’d had in years, because he had been homeless for so long. He said it was like telling people he had cancer. No one knew what to say to him.

Hank continued to charm Mrs. G out of food until the day he started drinking again. I hadn’t seen his slip coming. He didn’t show up for his shift one morning, but I thought he was just late. Then he called me, sounding all out of breath, almost like he was frightened. He asked me to meet him at Leavenworth and O’Farrell streets. I didn’t know what to think, so I rushed up there. On my way, I saw Mrs. G unlocking the door to her restaurant and I raised a hand but she didn’t see me. Then I saw Walter, sitting on a milk crate outside a convenience store with a bottle, and he asked me to put him in detox. You know where to go, I told him. How about a dollar, Katie? I shook my head. I thought of that painting at Mrs. G’s and how I’d like to take a trip one day just to be in a place where no one knew me.

I found Hank standing by a bus shelter across from a liquor store. I didn’t remember it from my drinking days and that bothered me. So much of my memory is shot, my life lost to so many blackouts that I can’t even remember a liquor store I’m sure I used. That’s saying something. But maybe I never did buy booze at this store.

Katie, Hank said.

Hi, Hank.

There was none of his usual shuck and jive. He gave me this look that said, I fucked up, but I knew that right off, look or no look. The neck of a pint bottle of whiskey stuck out of his jacket pocket. He wore blue jeans and white sneakers. His shirt looked crooked, like he had buttoned it wrong. I noticed dried mud on one side of his face and a cut on his left ear.

I don’t know why I called you. I’m just so mad, Katie. I’m just so mad.

About what? What happened?

He spit on the sidewalk.

What happened, Hank? I asked again.

He looked at me, his bloodshot eyes carrying a kind of hurt that I’d not seen in him before but felt within myself more than a few times back in the day, all sorts of torments I wouldn’t speak of and would use as excuses to drink.

I just get so frustrated sometimes, Katie.

He wrung his hands. He sat down in the shelter, dropped his head and stared, then started crying.

It’s OK, Hank, I tell him. We’ll talk about this later. For now, let’s go to detox.

It was me who put you in detox.

I know. This is payback.

He gave me a half smile, wiped his eyes.

That’s a good one, Katie. Remember when I said if I ever started drinking again, I’d never go to Fresh Start to detox, because it would be too embarrassing?

Yeah, and I said that kind of thinking is a good way to keep on drinking.