The Chosen

pulled up at the corner. “It’s time for your AA, Donna,” he said through the window. “Get in the car.”

The meetings depressed her—that’s why she initially didn’t like to go. A room full of people just like her, all telling the same grim stories. But eventually it sank in. It reassured her to know that she was not the only person in the world who’d done desperate things for a drink. Alcoholism, she learned, was a genetically founded disease, not just a failure of willpower. Some people could drink with no problem, others could have just one and that was their ruin. Dan B. sat through the meetings with her, which must have been particularly grueling, for he barely drank at all. Two beers was it for him. Yet he insisted on being there with her every time. One night she’d asked him. “Why do you do all this for me?”

“Because I love you,” he said. “Why do you think?”

It was an alien word to her, and one that had never been spoken to her by any man. Love—real love—was not something that happened to drunks. Then one day it dawned on her that she’d not had a drink in almost a month…

Dan B. had given her back what a horrible circumstance had stolen from her: her life.

A month later they got married.

««—»»

Which left them to their dreams. But what were they? Donna had gotten more out of the deal than she’d ever imagined; she’d gotten the chance to live again. She could scarcely think beyond that. But what of Dan B.? He’d been saving for years, in hopes to one day own his own place. The money he could bank from The Inn could make his dream real, yet he’d been reluctant to move. “If we move, you won’t be able to go to your AA meetings anymore,” he’d revealed his only worry. Again, it was her, it was Donna that was his only concern. “You’re all the AA I need now,” she’d assured him. She’d been the one to insist they take the new positions that Vera had arranged, not that she was too keen on living in the sticks, but because it provided her the opportunity, finally, do give something back to Dan B., to do something for him. The extra money they both made would give Dan B. his own restaurant that much sooner.

He slept beside her now, snoring softly in the big, plush bed. Donna felt blissful, sedate; they’d made slow love earlier. His semen still trickled in her; it reminded her of a gift, or a verifier of sorts. One day, when their other dreams came true, she’d give him a baby…

Suddenly, she shuddered beneath the covers, like a jag of vertigo. She groaned. A bad memory swung before her mind, an unwelcome image from the Bad Old Days. It was an anonymous poem: The past is as present as the truth is a lie, all this time you think you’re living, then one day you wake up and die. What an awful poem, and an awful recollection. The poem had always stuck in her head for some reason, perhaps to remind her to never take things for granted. It was from years ago. Donna had been blowing some cowboy in the men’s room of a bar in San Angelo, Texas. He’d left her sitting there with a twenty-dollar bill in her hand. She’d spat his sperm into the toilet, and then she looked up and seen the poem amid phone numbers and expletives. It had been written on the stall door in magic marker.

Why should such a memory resurface now? Things were good now, and the Bad Old Days were in the past. The past is as present, she thought, as the truth is a lie… What did it mean?

Suddenly the bedroom’s warm and cozy dark felt full of unseen ghosts. A tear drooled out of her eye, and she turned to hug Dan B. Ghosts, she thought. The memory was one of her past’s many demons, coming back for a little haunt…

Donna could live with that, she’d have to. Forget it, she thought. Goddamn the poet, though, and that funk-crotch cowboy slime who’d known just the right way to take advantage of her. “Say, honey, you say you’re twenty short on your tab? Well, I can think of way to clear that up a might fast.” Fuck you. He was probably in the same bar right now, pulling that same ploy. Yeah, she considered