The Christian who is pure and without fault, from God the Father’s point of view, is the one who takes care of orphans and widows, and who remains true to the Lord—not soiled and dirtied by his contacts with the world. James, chapter 1, verse 27. I want you to call me when Martin gets his check from McGraw.
I don’t miss a beat.
Sure, Raymond, I say. I’ll do that.
I go back outside. I stare down at my shoes, my mind a blank for a hot minute before it gets all kinds of crazy with thoughts about Laird and Raymond and how I’m going to handle them. More rats race along the curb into a sewer. My skin crawls. Jesus, they make me feel dirty. I press my hands against my ears, try to keep my mind from racing. Slow down, I tell myself, slow down, but I can’t. I hadn’t thought through on Laird and I hadn’t expected Raymond would want to keep up with Martin. I mean, he just lost his job and all he thinks about is Martin. No, I hadn’t seen that one coming at all.
I look around and try to shake this sense of doom settling on me, but my head feels all stuffed, like it’s about to explode. I see Big Pete across the street with Ross and John still hustling outside the drop-in. Man, to think they had apartments in the Richmond at one time. Now nothing, their faces dirt-streaked and wide-eyed jittery, and their clothes smelling of damp nights spent in Golden Gate Park.
Pete notices me and lifts his chin.
I put up my hands like I’m out of change and shrug.
He laughs. I keep looking at him and just like that I know what I need to do. My head clears. Come here, Pete, I think. He stares back and stops laughing. My eyes don’t budge off his. There’s this invisible line between us drawing him to me. Come here, Pete. He walks across the street under my spell.
What? he says.
You hear about Laird?
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.
