I'll Be You(46)

But Tamar didn’t answer her phone. She was probably still at the café, working the evening shift. When her voicemail picked up, I found myself leaving an entirely different message than I’d intended.

“Hey, Tamar. I know I’m supposed to be back at work on Friday, but I could use a few more days.” The waitress was walking back toward me, wine in one hand, corkscrew displayed like an offering in her palm. “There’s a lot going on here and I just feel like I’m…needed.” Even if my mother doesn’t agree, I thought. I hung up.

I let the waitress pour me a glass.

The wine tasted like cherries and leather on my tongue. My whole mouth was on fire, every taste bud lighting up, awakened from a year of dull dormancy. I pushed aside the nagging voice—what are you doing, you’ve been triggered, you were doing so well, you’re proving that your mother was right not to trust you, show some self-control—and took another sip. And then another, until the smooth oblivion of a wine buzz pushed the self-doubt further and further under the surface and all that was left was This is fine. You’ve earned this. It’s just a little wine.

A few glasses in, it occurred to me that I was drinking alone, which was the most dangerous kind of drinking—the kind of drinking that had, in the past, led to regrettable acts of pathetic desperation. If I was going to fall off the wagon tonight, I wanted it to be fun. I needed a companion, and the only one I could think of was Caleb. Which seemed like a great idea until I remembered that he was supposed to be sober.

I called him anyway. He answered on the first ring, and sounded happy enough to hear from me, until I told him where I was.

“I’m at an Italian restaurant by myself and I’m about to order another bottle of wine,” I said to him.

There was silence on the other end of the line. “Another?”

“The last bottle was pinot. Not sure what this one’s going to be. A cabernet. Maybe something with bubbles.”

“I see.” He sounded amused. Or maybe he sounded concerned. I couldn’t quite tell. “Are you going to drink it?”

“No, I’m just going to stare at it for a while, I think.” The words slid on my tongue, fuzzed with tannins. My flippant act wasn’t at all convincing.

“I think I should come join you,” he said, which of course was what I’d been hoping for all along.



* * *



—

By the time Caleb walked in the door, I had finished off the pinot and the waitress was returning with a Lambrusco that she’d advertised as having “perfect effervescence.” He stood in the front of the restaurant, studying the tables, jiggling up and down in his shoes. The shoes were leather, and he was wearing a button-down shirt with fresh iron marks in it. He’d dressed up for me, which made me feel warm in my fingertips, although maybe that was just the alcohol.

I waved him over. “You clean up nice,” I said.

His ears went pink as he slid into the chair across from me. “Sorry it took me so long. I had to hunt down a sitter.”

“You were with Mae tonight?” A mix of emotions knocked at my chest. Guilt, that I’d dragged him away from his daughter. Delight, that he’d go through the effort for me. Concern, that perhaps his reason for going through the effort was not that he wanted to hang out with me but because he thought it was his duty.

He shrugged. “It sounded like you needed company.”

I arched an eyebrow. “Are you here to save me from myself?”

The waitress had arrived with the bottle of wine and he let her pour him a glass. “So, not here to save me from myself, apparently.”

“It looks like that ship has sailed.”

I twirled the stem of the glass of wine in my hand, sloshing Lambrusco across the tablecloth. “Ah, but how far will it sail is the question?”

“I’m not here to lecture you,” he said. “I’m here to make sure you don’t get yourself into too much trouble.”

I pointed at his glass of wine. “And are you going to get yourself into trouble? I thought you’d been sober for years. I didn’t realize it would be so easy to knock you off your pedestal.”

“I still drink a glass of wine on occasion. The difference is that now I know how to stop.”

I took a sip of the Lambrusco, which was perfectly effervescent. It lit up one side of my brain, even as the other was starting to feel troublesomely fuzzy. “And how do you know when to stop?”

“God tells me.”

He said it so simply that I assumed he was deadpanning, but he looked back at me with clear blue eyes and the laughter died in my throat. “You believe in all that higher power stuff in AA? Because I always skipped over that step.”

“My sponsor was a believer. At first I just did the prayers with him because that’s what you’re supposed to do, right? Go through the motions until it sticks? But then I realized that it was really helping.” He took a modest sip of his wine. “The thing is, I like to believe that there’s something out there keeping me company as I go through my life, nudging me in the right direction. It’s a lot less lonely than believing you’re all by yourself, right? It makes me feel responsible to something bigger than me.”

“As in God, the supernatural authority figure in the sky?”