About the Author

Trigger Warning: This contains several triggers including active drug abuse and falling off the wagon with secondary characters. There are also deep discussions of drug recovery and drug abuse from a main character. Please proceed with caution.

We have two lives; the second begins when we realize we only have one.

Confucius

NIK

“What I wanna know is, when will I wake up and not think about snorting crank?” Walt asked as I topped off his dolly with a crate of oranges we’d received in our delivery that morning.

An ache tightened through my arms and traveled up to my throat. I picked up my scanner and moved to the next pallet, hoping he would let the subject drop. At sixty years old, Walt had been in rehab over a dozen times, but his last run had him clean for three months—his longest stretch in ten years.

And that right there was why I needed to quit my job.

Anyone worth their salt knew a sober life was tough. Sunrise was the first job I’d ever held longer than a month. I’d been working here for four years and clean for five. I was still waiting for the day when there would be more to my life than being in recovery, but recovery was all anyone ever wanted to talk about here.

If Walt talked like that somewhere else, he’d be back on the streets in two seconds flat, but Sunrise Market didn’t give a damn. Hell, it was part of the company’s entire mission. If someone in recovery needed a job, Sunrise was hiring.

“Hey, Nik, you’ve been at this way longer than the rest of us. What wisdom can you offer?” Walt wheezed as he pulled the dolly toward the shelves. “Tell me something to distract my bad knees.”

My head tilted to the side as I winced. The problem with Walt was that he didn’t know volume control. I looked up from my scanner, hoping his question didn’t draw attention and put me on the spot, but it was too late—six of the morning crew stared at me with equal curiosity.

Somehow, word always got around that I was the OG here, so every time I worked a shift, people wanted to talk about my sobriety. It made sense because after pulling ourselves out of the dark, sobriety felt like winning the lottery. All they wanted to know was how it felt to be on the other side.

But what was I supposed to tell them? That I knew my days down to the minute? How I was so, so bored?

Naw, that was a recipe for relapse. Instead, when people asked me questions like this, I told them what they needed to hear and left the rest out.

To buy myself some time, I squatted to pick up a new shipment box of tomatoes and set it on the stocking cart. “I can’t front, Walt. Not really sure when it stopped. I just know the times where it wasn’t on my mind got longer and longer.”

“What the hell does ‘I can’t front’ mean?” Walt asked, his nose scrunched.

I gave Walt a closed mouth smile. He really knew how to keep things light. “Means I can’t lie.”

Walt stared at me for several seconds, eyebrows crinkled together. He tapped his barcode reader and began scanning the new boxes. “Well, why didn’t you just say that?”

The crew laughed at Walt’s grunt, and they turned back to their work, yapping about the drama one of them was engaging in with an ex-girlfriend. I never got involved in that kind of talk and usually shut it down, but it was way too early to regulate, and we had a lot to get done, so I let it slide.

Walt wasn’t into any of that mess, and it was why I enjoyed working with him. A deep wrinkle had settled between his bushy eyebrows, and his mouth twisted to the side as an aggressive tic jerked his head to the side, pockmarked cheeks puffing as he exhaled a long breath in defeat.

He abandoned his dolly and walked to me, leaning a little to the right to get a glimpse of the crew before he whispered, “You really don’t think about it anymore?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Walt’s shaky hands folding into fists. Yet another reminder of his years hooked on crank—a tremor that’d never go away. We all had punishments we would serve for the rest of our lives, and that was one of Walt’s.

I lifted a stack of cardboard boxes and began scanning. “At the start, it was all I thought about. Now, not as much. I won’t lie, though, there are some days I’ll be chill and vibin’, and I pass by a place I used to go to score, and it hits me.” I lightly banged a fist to my chest. “Then other days I do my business, and it don’t cross my mind once.”

Walt’s gray eyes squinted with suspicion, and he walked to his dolly and tilted it back with a groan. “How did you get through those days where it’s all you can think about?” he asked. “There are nights I dream about getting high, like it’s embedded in my subconscious. I’d give anything to dream about income statements and retained earnings again.”

Once upon a time, Walt had the dream life. He owned his own tax accounting business, was married to his college sweetheart, had a McMansion in Atlanta, and put both of his kids through college.

At the rate he’d been going, it sounded like he could’ve retired early. After a couple of years of using, however, he was bankrupt, divorced, and homeless. It didn’t matter that Walt was over twice my age. Everyone here had a version of the same story. If I was ever going to move past being an addict, I needed to leave this place and start something new.

For now, I had to tell Walt what I’d told dozens of people in his place. “You gotta change your focus, and eventually, your body gets used to it. I don’t miss a meeting unless I absolutely have to, and when I do, I check in with my sponsor. I have dinner with my mentor and his husband every Saturday. Picked up a couple of hobbies, and I catch up with my brother when he’s in town. He trusts me enough that I can be around my nephew, which is a big win. Now I got my place, even though paying rent’s a bitch.”

“Change my focus,” Walt said to himself as he slowly resumed hauling the stock. He looked defeated. It was a common look around here. Everyone was lost, and they were trying to figure out how to make it until the next day.

Maybe that was why I was stuck here. Sobriety wasn’t very exciting, but there wasn’t a single person here who didn’t understand how scary change was for us.

The stock room opened, and Duncan slipped in with a couple of other employees coming back from one of their million smoke breaks. He searched the room, and when our eyes connected, he jerked his head toward the front before leaving.

“Be right back, y’all,” I said, waving at one of the crew to take my spot. “Duncan wants to talk to me.”

A few whistles came in response, and someone said, “Maybe he’ll give you that promotion you’ve been jerking off to. If you get it, take us all out for a celebration on your new pay.”

I walked backward toward the door and pursed my lips. “Are you asking me out? I don’t put out on the first date, you know.”

This earned a bark of laughter from the other guys and a middle finger directed toward me. Our back-of-house crew got away with a bit more brashness than the sales floor and front end, and we often took advantage of it.

We wove through the aisles until we hit Duncan’s office, which was a wreck, his desk permanently covered in stacks of papers and folders. He sank into his office chair with a tired sigh and scrubbed his eyes. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you all day, but I’m swamped with new-hire paperwork.”

I looked over at the empty chair in front of the smaller desk that served as Chance’s area when he came in to help new hires. He was the only person Duncan trusted with them. Chance’s charisma made people feel important and worthy, and it made every new hire trust him, even when their trust in people had vanished. It made sense why Duncan had married the guy.

Bipolar disorder was the devil knockin’ on Chance’s door, filling his days with medications and their adjustments, appointments with doctors and therapists. Some days were harder than others, and everyone felt his absence. Chance got what it was like to be bound to schedules, and he had a system for those bad days when it was impossible for him to be there for everyone.

I owed everything to Chance and Duncan. They’d been there for me when my family and friends gave up on my ass, then continued to support me even when I kept falling off the wagon. They still believed in me, even when I questioned if I should even believe in myself.

Duncan rallied for my sobriety every day, had put aside a lot of his own life for it, even when I couldn’t deal with it anymore. Chance knew what it was like to not want to live, and I owed the breath I took today to him.

Which was why it was hard not to worry about Chance when he was having a hard time. Seeing him at work had indirectly become a part of my routine, and on the rare occasion he wasn’t here, it left me wrong-footed for the whole day. “Did you schedule therapy for him? You know he likes to fight about it when it’s not his idea.”

Duncan reached out and squeezed my wrist. “We got a couple of appointments set up this week. It’s likely a med change. If anything changes, I’ll let you know.”

“Good. ’Cause Chance would be hella pissed if you didn’t.”

Duncan laughed and straightened a tilting stack of papers. “Very true. How’s Walt doing?”

I stared at the photo of Duncan and Chance’s wedding and grabbed the wooden duck next to it. Chance had made it when he was a kid and always found faults, but I liked its rough edges and wonky tail. It was flawed, and that I could identify with.

“Ornery, but he’s doing great.” I leaned on the wall and spun the wooden duck in my hands. “Adjusting well to the pace, and he gets along with everyone else in the back room, which is a plus. I can relax and not have to put out fires.”

Duncan shuffled through a couple of folders, nodding along. “Awesome. Chance is gonna be jazzed to know that he did his placement right.”

My hands stopped, and I slowly peered up at Duncan. “That’s not why you brought me here.”

Duncan shot me a sideways glance, his tongue poking at his lip ring. “Not entirely, no.” He swiveled in his chair and rested his ankle on his knee. “How do you feel about handling the new hires?”