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  “I really can’t tell if you’re joking,” Leslie said.

  “Okay, Leslie,” Kim said.

  “I’m just talking,” Leslie said. “At least I’m not bothering you about your shit.”

  “We’re all admiring your restraint,” Kim said.

  Cal put his hand on hers from across the table.

  “Les is just being the smart one,” he said. “It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it.”

  “What does that mean?” Leslie said.

  “I just mean you always think everything through,” Cal said. “That’s what I love about you. That’s why we need you.”

  Cal’s face glowed pink in the neon light of the bar’s window sign, giving his affability a demonic cast. The “we” in this speech was embarrassing, worse even than the “I” and the “you.”

  “I think you’re overestimating me,” Leslie said.

  She would get down to writing for real when she got home—no more putting it off. If Cal could write three lame historical novels and Marcus could become an artist, nascent or otherwise, and Kim could get on the radio, as she had last week, talking about her memoir in progress, surely she could produce something of proportionate value, or at least something not embarrassing. And if she couldn’t, well, then maybe she didn’t deserve to be so goddamn opinionated.

  “Oh shit,” Kim said, looking past Leslie. James the bartender now had the drink-stealer in a headlock from behind the bar. The haggard guy flailed his arms listlessly and kicked over a stool.

  “I told you to cut it the fuck out,” James said. The other guy seemed to be giving up, or passing out.

  “That seems really unnecessary,” Cal said.

  He was probably right. And yet, she didn’t feel that bad about it. How’s this for identification: she wasn’t sure whether she’d rather be the guy getting choked or the guy doing the choking.

  “I’m going to see if I can help,” Cal said. He moved toward the crowd of people who were standing around the bar not helping.

  “Would you be nicer?” Kim said.

  Leslie turned and gave her a slow-dawning, shrunken-head smile.

  They focused their attention on the growing melee just as Cal took a kick to the nose from the flailing drunk guy. He put his hands over his face and dropped to his knees.

  “Okay, now call the police,” Kim said.

  Leslie started to say, “Why me?” out of pure instinct, but caught herself. Why not her? She pressed the emergency button in her contact list for the first time ever as Kim moved across the room to help Cal. She tried to commit the details of the tableau to memory—the drunk’s sweatpants held up, barely, by a piece of weathered rope, the usually gentle-mannered James grinning sadistically as he shouted obscenities at the man in his grip. Cal, helped to his feet by Kim, and Kim pressing a pile of cocktail napkins to his bleeding nose. When the dispatcher picked up, Leslie was pretty sure she wasn’t witnessing an emergency. But since she was already on the line, she explained, as clearly as she could, what she saw. It was a first draft.

  With the Christopher Kids

  On christmas eve i wandered around my mother’s house looking for things to wrap. For the last three days I’d been slamming doors and doing cocaine and forgetting that it was the season of giving, nominally because my girlfriend Melanie had left me hours before our trip north to visit our respective families. If I was being fair—which I wasn’t—Melanie’s decision made sense: Why wait until after the holiday disasters to sever ties? It was one less thing to hold against each other forever. Downstairs, my sister Patricia hollered for scissors.

  I opened the game closet and tried to find something without too many pieces missing. First Down! NFL Challenge was unopened, but twenty years old. Warren Moon was an Oiler. The Oilers existed. Was it nostalgic kitsch yet? It went in the “maybe” pile. I heard Patricia pound up the back steps with Yoshi’s little dog claws clicking behind her.

  “You’re wrapping, yeah?” she said. “I need paper, tape, and scissors.”

  “Everyone’s got problems,” I said.

  She looked over at my gift pile: A VHS copy of Con Air, a dusty martini shaker, a ceramic pig.

  “Maybe some of your presents can be from both of us,” I said.

  “Somehow that doesn’t seem fair,” Patricia said. My sister was in recovery and therefore disapproved of my selfish, histrionic drug binge.

  “I’m doing my best,” I said. Yoshi nuzzled my leg because she loved me and wanted me to be happy.

  “Give me the wrapping stuff and I won’t call you out on how full of shit you are,” Patricia said.

  When I finally came back with the things she’d asked for, Patricia was examining the underside of a massive pink conch shell that I’d found in my closet.

  “‘Souvenir of a lifetime, St. Kitts ’96,’” she read. “Do you remember that trip?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Me neither,” she said. “Those vacations all blur together. I guess we were probably fucked up.”

  “We were, like, children in 1996,” I said.

  “I bet it was nice. Oh well.”

  I followed her downstairs but took a detour to the back deck to smoke a cigarette. There was some new snow out there that crunched under my feet in a not-hostile way. Someone had put cows in the field behind the woods, and I could hear them moaning. This was New Jersey, Princeton, for Christ’s sake. The cows knew they were far from home.

  The last night I’d spent with Melanie had been in her little house outside Durham. It rained so hard I thought the roof was going to come down on us, and when we had sex, Melanie wouldn’t make a sound no matter what I did. In the morning, over pancakes, she told me she was unhappy, that she needed time to think. Then, half an hour later, while I sat drinking coffee in a diner down the street, she called and told me that, actually, she’d thought about it enough. The rain turned to snow near the fourth tollbooth in Delaware, and kept at it for the next two days.

  My mother opened the porch door.

  “I don’t care that you’re smoking,” she said. “As long as it’s just for now.”

  It was true, she didn’t care. If I caught my kid smoking, I’d make him smoke a whole pack, or hang a burning cigarette around his neck for twenty-four hours like a dog that’s killed a chicken.

  “It’s just for now,” I said.

  “You know, if you don’t go to bed, Santa won’t come.”

  “Ma, it’s only nine-thirty.”

  “Not in the North Pole it isn’t,” she said. “How does Patricia seem to you?”

  “A little on edge,” I said. “But straight.”

  “And you?” my mother said.

  I tossed my cigarette toward the trees. It landed, still lit despite the snow, in the middle of the yard. “Similar.”

  When I went inside, Patricia was wrapping presents at the kitchen table.

  “I hate to see you like this,” she said.

  “Would you drive me to the train?” I said. “I want to go to New York.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Would you shoot me in the head?”

  “Help me wrap this,” she said. I sat down across the table from her and put Yoshi in my lap. She squirmed and whined but I held her tight.

  “This is what I got Mom,” Patricia said. It was a jagged chunk of shiny blue rock. “It’s from Brazil. I always get her books, so I thought, This year, make it a rock.”

  “Expensive?”

  “The heart’s love is priceless,” she said.

  Patricia was twenty-six, three years younger than me. She’d been in and out of rehab since college but seemed to have pulled it together in the last couple of years. I’d never been to rehab myself, but until recently we’d taken turns being the one with a substance problem. Now it was all up to me. She lived in New York and wrote lyrics for off-Broadway musicals; I was a freelance radio producer, which lately meant recording pieces about the Research Triangle’s homeless population and then being told
to send something less depressing. Tricia has always been much more talented than me, and I was proud when I wasn’t furious about it. She and her writing partner were hard at work on a musical about Helen Gurley Brown, the already-overexposed editor of Cosmopolitan. It was a mercenary project—Tricia wasn’t really into that shit—but it seemed destined for success. Sex in the City plus Mad Men plus singing till your eyes fall out.

  “Can we at least go to a bar?” I said.

  “Steven, it’s Christmas Eve.”

  “Tucker’s will be open,” I said. A couple of Christmases ago I’d passed out at a table in the bar and woken up on the bartender’s couch, naked, but, I concluded, inviolate.

  “You should think of this as an opportunity to pull yourself together,” Patricia said. “You still have a choice.”

  “If I stay in this house one more hour I’m going to lose my fucking mind,” I said. “I did a lot for you when you were in bad shape.”

  “When I was an alcoholic,” Patricia said. “You are begging an alcoholic to take you to a bar.”

  “Right, but you’re okay now,” I said. “I’m not.”

  “It’s called enabling,” she said. “Didn’t you listen on visitor’s day? You’ve been to enough of them.”

  I really didn’t want to go alone. I’d been having waking nightmares about Melanie, thinking she was behind me, hearing her voice in the room. And the idea of driving, after the ten-hour tear from Durham, gave me the shakes. I fled to my room and put on a Beatles record. “It won’t be long, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.” I cut out a line on my desk with my debit card. This was the decent stuff I’d gotten from a friend in the South, which I’d been trying to make last by alternating it with the bad stuff I’d picked up from a kid in town. I should probably mention here that I don’t know anything about cocaine.

  I heard a soft knock at the door and opened it a crack.

  “Look, you don’t need to be secretive about what you’re doing in there,” Patricia said.

  “Sure I do.”

  “Well,” she said. “Is it any good?”

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  “Okay, look, could I … could I have some?” She held out her hands like Oliver Twist.

  “You shouldn’t,” I said.

  “I know, I know,” she said. “But I’d love to have just a little. It’s Christmas, you know?”

  She was so sweet about it, her voice gravelly and poignant. This wasn’t the old junkie sis, chugging vodka out of a water bottle before dinner; this was Tricia when we were kids, asking if she could come up into the tree house. No, it was not my finest moment.

  “Will you drive me to the bar?” I said.

  “Definitely.”

  I let her in, cut the line in half, handed over the loosely rolled ten-dollar bill. She tightened it up like a pro and bent down over the desk. “Oh man, it’s been a while,” she said.

  “Savor it,” I said. “Because you aren’t getting any more.”

  She sprawled back onto the bed. “This is all’s I need.”

  I did mine—one more hit of cool damp cave—and put my hands on her shoulders.

  “To Tucker’s,” I said.

  “Can I have just a little tiny bit more?” she said. “Since I can’t drink?”

  Well, we’d gone this far. I cut her a line from the bad stuff.

  “That one burned,” she said. “Yuck.”

  * * *

  When I was fourteen, I was sent off to the boarding school my father went to and found myself scared and lonely twenty-four hours a day. I was a good student but my friends were the bad kids, the ones who were smart enough not to get expelled but still spent most of their time stoned. At a school like that, where everyone was training to die of a heart attack on a yacht in the Bahamas, there was something noble about the opt-outers. I cried at night from homesickness even in my third year. I was the favorite of my first housemaster and a scourge upon my second for the same reason: I wouldn’t leave him and his family alone. I could never fall asleep.

  One weekend in the fall of my senior year, Tricia came up north to see me. It was against the rules, of course, but we stayed in a Marriott on Route 1 paid for by our parents, who called and told the school that they were staying with us. Tricia was sixteen and had gotten a bottle of vodka somewhere. We sat in the hotel room drinking screwdrivers and watching HBO for two days straight, eating delivery pizza and Chinese food because we were afraid of being seen by someone from school if we left the room. We came up with movie ideas and argued about the merits of Bright Eyes and drank until we threw up and then drank more. Tricia seemed to understand what my problem was even though I couldn’t explain it. She made me feel better. When we said goodbye at the train station on Sunday afternoon, the thought of going back to school alone made me cry.

  “You’ll be home soon,” Tricia said, and rubbed my back.

  “I don’t want to go home,” I said. “I don’t want anything.”

  “Don’t be dramatic,” she said.

  Back at the dorm that night I finished the handle of vodka by myself and passed out on the communal bathroom floor. By some miracle my friend Landon, and not an adult or a snitch, was the one who found me, and he managed to get me back to my room. I woke up with puke in my bed and scared myself into not drinking until I went home for Thanksgiving.

  And then at Thanksgiving … actually, that’s enough.

  * * *

  Now, Tricia’s car reeked of old cigarettes and french fries. We lit new cigarettes to cover it up. The radio was playing “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”

  “I wish they’d play the Italian Christmas donkey,” Patricia said. “You remember the Italian Christmas donkey song?”

  “It might be too racist now,” I said.

  “America can suck my dick,” said Patricia. “This is the Wacky Races, Dick Dastardly, and Muttley. No room for moral hypocrisy here.”

  There was joy in me for the first time since I got dumped. We, the Christopher kids, were single and high and going to see the sad people in the bar on Christmas. We would tell them, like that angel What’s-His-Name, to rejoice and be glad.

  “Yo, we should pick up some candy canes,” I said. “To distribute unto the drunks.”

  “Eh, I’ve got a bag of Hershey’s Kisses from Halloween in the trunk,” Tricia said. “No trick-or-treaters this year. As usual.”

  “Did you know candy canes are supposed to be shaped like shepherd’s sticks?” I said. “Crooks, rather? And the red stripes are the blood of Jesus? I guess everyone knows that.”

  Patricia rubbed at her cheek. “My face is itchy,” she said. “Does my face look weird?”

  I turned on the light in the front seat and, yikes, her face did look a little weird. There was a fiery blotch spreading from her nose up across the side of her face.

  “It’s a little red,” I said.

  “It itches,” she said. “I’m not allergic to coke. I used to do it all the time.”

  “Maybe you’re allergic to the other stuff in it. You’re not really allergic to things, are you?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  I’d done plenty of that lousy batch and I felt fine.

  “It’ll probably go away.”

  I turned off the light and hoped for the best.

  “Bad things always happen to me in cars,” Patricia said. “Tom broke up with me when we were driving home from Cape Cod. Then I crashed my car and had to go to rehab. Cars are a real problem area for me.”

  “Trains are good,” I said. “I’d live on a train if I could.”

  We were at the parking lot of the bar, which looked dark but open, with a few beat-up cars out front.

  “Okay, my face is officially fucking on fire,” Patricia said. She turned on the light and flipped down the driver’s-side mirror. Her face was a mess. The right side was so swollen that her eye was almost closed.

  “Oh shit, Stevie,” she said. “I think I need to go to the hospital.”

&nbsp
; “Maybe the bar will have some antihistamines or something,” I said. “Don’t worry. If something really bad was going to happen it would’ve happened already.”

  I patted her on the shoulder and she jerked away. I hustled into the bar and immediately felt better in the bleach-smelling dimness. The front area was a liquor store, half lit and empty, and a couple of guys were slumped at the bar in the back of the room. Maud the bartender was looking up at a TV playing It’s a Wonderful Life. It was the scene where Jimmy Stewart abandons his new wife to calm the run on the bank. The blonde whose name I could never remember was standing behind Maud wearing an apron. As if they needed a waitress tonight. Maybe she had a bad family life and wanted to be my new girlfriend?

  “Maud, I came to celebrate the birth of Christ with you, but I wonder if you have any antihistamines?”

  “What a nice tradition this is!” she said.

  “My sister’s having an allergic reaction,” I said. “She’s feeling anxious about it.”

  “Aw, the little drunk?” she said. “That’s a shame. I think I have some Advil.”

  “Let’s give it a chance,” I said. “And some ice in a cup and some water?” And. “And a couple shots of vodka?”

  As she got the stuff an old guy at the bar turned to me. “Crap Christmas,” he said.

  “I’ve got some candy in the car,” I said. “You like Hershey’s Kisses?”

  He worked his grizzled jaws like he already had that chocolate in his mouth.

  “Don’t you have a family to bother?” he said.

  I took down my shots and gathered the supplies from Maud. “Couch is free, kid,” she said.

  “Did you expect me to pay for it?” I said.

  “The drinks aren’t.”

  “On my tab,” I said. “And tip yourself extra holiday bucks!” I didn’t have a tab.

  In the car, Tricia was leaning back in her seat with her eyes closed. She was mutating before my eyes. “Steven?” she croaked. “You need to drive me to the hospital.”

  “Take this Advil,” I said. “You’ll feel better.”