He stopped. Took a long pull through the straw.
“Only I saw him going down Main Street,” Zoe said, seamlessly taking over where he’d left off, “and I stopped and asked him if he needed a ride, and the next thing we knew, we were having a soda together. And we had a good talk.”
And now here they were, doing it again the next day. There was some kind of subtext in all this, but I swear I didn’t know what it was.
I think she saw the confusion on my face, because she looked at Roy, a question in her eyes. He nodded, and she offered it up without my having to ask.
“Your brother asked if I would be his NA sponsor. Which I think your average recovering person would consider a very dicey choice, if not absolute insanity. Partly because men usually get men sponsors and vice versa. But that’s just so there won’t be any weird emotional attachments, and with me being somewhere between old enough to be his mother and old enough to be his grandmother, I guarantee that’s not going to be an issue. More to the point, I don’t have any more clean time than he does.”
“But you had a bunch of years before,” Roy said. “You know a lot more than I do.”
“Other people know more,” she said.
“That’s not the point, though,” Roy said. “Here’s the point. When she walked into that meeting the other night . . .”
That’s when I realized he was talking to me. He wasn’t looking at me. But when he called Zoe “she” rather than “you,” I got it.
“. . . it just changed something for me. Because I knew what she had in her past was so hard, you know? One of those things you never stop regretting, that never really leaves you alone. So I figured if she could pull it together and commit to getting clean again and keep going, so could I. It sort of gave me hope for my situation. That’s why she thinks I need to count my clean time from that night.”
“Whatever,” Zoe said, shaking off his praise. “Bottom line, we’re looking to give that a go, no matter what anybody around us might think of the idea.” Zoe turned her attention directly onto me. “Would that be weird for you? If I was Roy’s sponsor?”
“No!” I said. Shouted, almost, though I hadn’t meant to. “No, it would be great.” I felt as though a huge weight had been lifted off me. I didn’t realize how much the weight of saving my brother had been crushing me until Zoe lifted it away. “If you helped him half as much as you helped Connor . . .”
“I didn’t do anything special with Connor,” she said. But I knew that wasn’t true. “Don’t invest too much in me, kid, like I’m magic. That boy just had some stuff he needed to get off his chest. That’s all that was.”
I heard the distinctive sucking sound of a straw running dry. Hitting the bottom of its drink. I looked over to see that Roy had rushed through the bottom half of his soda and was pushing to his feet.
“I’ll go home and tell Mom I’m alive,” he said.
“She might be driving around looking for you,” I said. “Don’t be too surprised if you run into her accidentally.”
He didn’t answer. Only shook his head. Because . . . you know. That was our mom. What could you do but shake your head about her?
“You need a ride, son?” Zoe asked him.
“No, ma’am. Finish your coffee. I need to practice walking anyway. You two sit. I’ll go sort it out with Mom.”
I watched him swing along on his crutches, headed for the door. Watched a local man with two little kids hold the door open for him. The man nodded at my brother proudly, as though Roy were some kind of war hero.
I wondered if Roy would get to keep that. Or if, in a town this size, the truth would find its way out.
I looked back at Zoe, and she looked at me. We’d been doing that a lot lately, I’d noticed. Looking each other head on, both at the same time. Like we weren’t afraid. Like we had nothing to hide and nothing to lose.
At least, not from each other.
“What did you do that helped Connor so much?” I asked her. “I’d really like to know.”
“I just told you.”
“But there had to be more to it than that. You couldn’t have just sat there and said nothing while he talked.”
“Now and then I might’ve said something in reply.”
“Like what?”
She sighed. Rolled her eyes at me, like I was still the little pest I’d always been. But not really in a bad way, if such a thing were possible. Then she surprised me by offering up a serious answer.
“Like when he talked about his mom, and how much she smothers him, and depends on him too hard. I just told him he wasn’t wrong for minding. Kids get to feeling like they ought to be everything a parent needs, and they feel guilty if they fall short. But I told him anybody in his position would feel the same way, and it’s normal to feel it. And his dad leaving the way he did. I just told him it was between the man and his wife, something that’d been going on years before he was born, and it didn’t have nearly as much to do with him as he might’ve
