The Chosen

^{CHAPTER FOURTEEN}

Donna supposed they must seem the oddest couple. Dan B. was big, brusk, brazen-mouthed—he sometimes took things too seriously—while Donna cast an opposite appearance: fawnish, sometimes flighty. Perhaps it was this very contrast that held them so securely together. Donna didn’t really care about the whys and wherefores. All that mattered was that they loved each other.

Making it hadn’t been easy for the two of them—they had their dreams much as any couple did. But it was difficult to pursue a dream beyond life’s often brutal realities. She’d done a lot of low things in her life, back in the Bad Old Days, many of which she’d never even told Dan B. How could she? What man would want her? She hadn’t had a drink in over six months; the most she’d ever gone before that was six days. It was Dan B. who had pulled her out. He never gave up on her, where most guys gave up the first week, or night. Yet Dan B. was the only one who’d cared enough about her to keep her from faltering. Many of the men before him actually encouraged her to drink. It made me an easy fuck, she realized now, in the tense dark. Sometimes she cried just thinking about it, and about how ugly the world could be.

She’d boozed herself right out of college. Ten years ago? she wondered. Twelve? She’d spent the next decade throwing darts at a map of the country. Each new city, and its promise of a new start, spat her back out like used gum. How many towns had she been run out of? How many times had she made her name mud? Oh, God. From Akron to Tucson, Seattle to Baltimore, the one thing she could never escape was herself. She’d been fired from so many jobs that soon she’d run out of cities. Dark days. Each night after work she spent all her tips in the bars, and when she spent all her tips…

The memory made her sick. Alcoholism stripped her of her humanity. It was a common occurrence to flirt for drinks, but quite a few guys out there knew that scene. Often she’d do more than flirt. One night she tallied up a fifty-dollar tab in Fells Point, and she was broke. She wound up blowing a guy in the toilet stall to cover it. Another time, in Massachusetts, she’d been thrown out of some gin joint for coming on to customers. Trudging home, she passed out on the street. When she woke up she was in the back seat of a Delta 88 being gang-raped by three chuckling men. It went on for hours and she scarcely even knew it, she was so drunk. Later, they kicked her out of the car, half-naked, bleeding, with semen in her hair, and all she could think to say before they drove off was “Give me some money for a bottle and you can do it again.” The driver got out, kicked her in the head, and pissed on her…

Yeah, she thought now. The Bad Old Days. How much worse could they have been? She was barely holding down a barmaid job at The Rocks when she met Dan B. He’d just come up from Charleston after the four-star restaurant he was chefing at folded from financial problems, and now he was working at The Emerald Room. He didn’t have to date her long to realize she had a problem; he was carrying her out of bars right and left, but the thing that didn’t jibe was he kept coming back.

That had never happened before—it almost shocked her. “You’re a sucker to want to have anything to do with me,” she told him one night after tying on a giant one at Middleton’s Tavern. “I’m an alcoholic.”

“If that’s what you think,” he shouted in her face, “then that’s all you’ll ever be!”

She got fired from The Rocks for being drunk on duty. When she told Dan B., she expected him to dump her. Instead, he stuffed her in the car and took her to an AA meeting. Three times a week he took her. When she pitched a fit, he made her go anyway, often forcing her into the car. “I don’t want to go!” she’d yell. “I don’t give a shit what you want!” he’d yell back. “I’m not going to sit around and watch you kill yourself! Either you go on your own, or I drag you in and handcuff you to the fucking chair!”

Why did he put up with her? He even dropped a shift to take her to the meetings. Sometimes she’d actually hide, but he’d find her anyway. Once she’d skipped out to the City Dock, was about to walk into O’Brien’s for a gin and tonic, when Dan B.’s dusty station wagon