Page 88 of Steadfast
Delilah studied me again, her smile calm. “Breakups are always hard. But they’re especially rough on someone who’s trying to get a handle on his addiction. Do you feel sad?”
“Of course,” I admitted.
“Depressed?”
“I don’t know. It hasn’t been anything I can’t handle, if that’s what you’re asking.”
She pushed a business card toward me on the desk. “Here’s our main number, and also our emergency line. If you think you might do something you’d regret, I’d like you to call us first. Can you do that?”
“Sure,” I said slowly. But as I pulled the card across the wooden tabletop, something important occurred to me.
I’d removed myself from Sophie’s life because I was convinced that I was always one bad day away from falling off the wagon. That I couldn’t be trusted. This week had sucked, and I missed her like crazy, but I hadn’t been truly tempted to use. Not even once.
And that’s the thing—losing Sophie was pretty much the worst thing that could happen to me. Yet I wasn’t cruising the streets of Colebury for a hit right now. I was handling my bitterness the same way other people did. By being a grumpy asshole, basically.
“Be kind to yourself, okay?” my counselor said. “Get some exercise and do something that makes you feel good, as long as it doesn’t involve chemicals.”
“Okay,” I agreed.
“I mean, for heartbreak, binge-watching Netflix is a good place to start.”
I didn’t have Netflix or any way to watch it. But I wasn’t looking for pity, so I kept that to myself.
After Delilah asked me a few more questions and made sure I knew about every NA meeting in a twenty-mile radius, it was time to pee in a cup.
She led me to the sample room. There was no sink, and the toilet water was dyed blue, just in case someone was tempted to dilute his sample. I did my thing and turned in the evidence. It’s weird to hand a cup of your warm pee to a woman. What’s one more slightly humiliating moment in the life of an addict?
Afterward Delilah dispensed two weeks’ worth of Suboxone strips with a smile. “You’re doing great, Jude. Keep up the good work.”
“Thanks.” God, it was embarrassing how much I enjoyed hearing that praise. “See you next time,” I said.
When I left the clinic it was after five PM. I drove slowly through Montpelier just to amuse myself, and the movie theater came into view. The marquee promised a showing of the latest Marvel superhero movie.
I found myself pulling the Avenger into a parking spot and checking my wallet. Seventeen bucks, plus a credit card.
Be kind to yourself, the counselor had said.
Tonight that meant a mindless action movie and a bucket of popcorn.Sophie should be here next to you, my asshole brain suggested as I settled into my seat in the theater. Even if it was true, I needed this. Sophie might not be happy with me right now, but I needed to know if I could trust myself without her.
Tonight, at least, the answer was yes.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Sophie
Internal DJ soundtrack: “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen, the Jeff Buckley version
The first weekof January crawled by while I looked for Jude in the grocery store and in line at Crumbs. I watched for him at the gas station and at the bank ATM.
It had been two consecutive Wednesdays now that Jude didn’t come to work at the church dinner. Father Peters assured me that Jude was still going to his NA meeting, though. “He’ll be okay, Sophie. Give him some space.”
The one place I found him was the only one I wouldn’t have expected: my email inbox. Jude wasn’t an emailer. But one cloudy January afternoon I found a PayPal notification. “Jude Nickel has sent you $2147.” There was one line of text to explain. He’d written, “From Porsche parts sold. For your music school fund.”
That was it.
I wanted to tip my head back and scream at the heavens, and maybe I would have, except I was at work and still hoping against all logic to get a full-time job at the hospital.
And yet Jude wanted to ship me off to New York. That asshole!
