North Dakota Quarterly

Everyone I know is a recovering alcoholic. All they ever want to talk about is how they don’t drink anymore. It’s boring. Th e only time they tell the good stories is when they get together in secret meetings held in the church basement. Sometimes I go to these meetings. Th ey’re for members only. I joined for the activities. “Hi, my name is Leah, and I’m an alcoholic,” I say to an audience sitting in a semi- circle of folding chairs. “It has been twenty- six hours since my last drink.” I don’t want to lie. I used to lie a lot as a kid. I try not to do it as much anymore. Th e group looks at me with disappointed eyes. “It’s okay,” says Mark. I get that a lot. Yesterday, I was invited out for drinks aft er work. I’m only the receptionist so it was a pity invite. I had one beer and left.

Forgive me if I roll my eyes while I tell you this, but our son didn’t invite us to his wedding. It’s true that he got married in a quickie civil ceremony in one of those blank rooms in the courthouse, but still. You’d think a kid, even a kid who had no interest in ceremonies, would invite his own parents to his wedding. Or marriage ceremony, or whatever you want to call it when you’re too precise, too dry, which is Drew all the way. He didn’t invite friends either, and I know he has a few. We were permitted to join him for what passed for a reception: just the four of us, an ordinary dinner at an ordinary restaurant that I knew we wouldn’t even remember the next week, let alone in our rapidly- approaching old age. And it was the fi rst time we’d met Alison, his bride. Let me tell you, she seemed a little stunned by the turn of events.

what you consume. Television shows everyone knows. Books and books and books. Articles, journals, Kindles, and Nooks. Z- Phone XIIs, tombstone bells. I read a line and gaze out the window, thinking, drinking coff ee, enjoying the cream in the coffee with no television. Th en I read again where I’ve just been.

I always came to in the same seminar room with Gertrude, Ray, Flannery, Ernest and Bill. Gertrude’s stories were usually letters cut out of magazines that looked like ransom notes. Ray’s pages were covered in cigarette ash, coff ee rings and grease blots. No one wrote better than Flannery and we all knew this. Bill favored linen suits, Ernest safari gear, and Ray liked polyester blends that looked like they were from Goodwill. Aft er class Flannery would stagger past me in her crutches. One night Ray had to excuse himself amid a coughing fi t. I asked him if he was going to be all right. He nodded, holding a bloody handkerchief over his mouth. Ernest usually woke up Bill when it was time to leave and together they would stagger out into the night leaning on each other for support. At the end of every class I’d fall asleep. When I woke up next, the class would be peering out at me, as if I’d been drooling on myself in my sleep.