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By Root 909 0

that I was quitting. And while I was at it, I also mentioned a number of things I hated about them and the job they'd given me, things that were totally untrue and that I wouldn't be able to take back later on and that I would have regretted immediately if I hadn't had so much beer in me in the first place. In this way I discovered something else drinking made possible: it made self-destruction seem attractive and let you say things you didn't mean and you might regret, but it also made you too drunk to regret them. When I hung up on my career in packaging forever, my mother said, "Are you going to stay here for a while?" and I said, "Do you want me to?" And she said, "I've missed you, Sam. I'm so sorry about everything," which I took to mean, Yes, I do want you to stay awhile. And I said, "Who needs another beer?" We all did, and then we all did again, and again, until I forgot that I'd been kicked out of my house, just like my father seemed to forget he was incapacitated: the more beer he drank, the more mobile he seemed to be, and by his sixth beer he was walking around and could get to the refrigerator and back under his own power, even, and his slurring wasn't quite so dramatic when he asked if anyone needed another drink, which we all did. We drank together, as a family, until there was nothing left to drink and nothing else to do but pass out, right there on the couch. Not once while I was drinking did I think about Anne Marie and the kids, just a few miles away, and this was another thing I learned that night: drinking helps you forget the things you need to forget, at least for a little while, until you pass out and then wake up two hours later and vomit all over yourself and then the hallway and then the bathroom.

Because drinking was another thing I'd bumbled and wasn't much good at. All the beer flooded out of me, and all my failures flooded back in, as if in retaliation for my thinking I could forget them: those letters, my wife, my kids, my job, my parents, Thomas Coleman, his parents, their deaths, my life! They were all speaking to me, their voices shouting over the sounds of my retching, a regular chorus of recrimination bouncing off the porcelain and tile. And then there was another voice, a voice that had a hand, a gentle hand on my back, and was saying, "It's OK, it's OK."

"It is?" I asked.

"You'll feel better in the morning," she said.

It was my mother. And because it was my mother, I felt I could say anything and not be too ashamed of it, and so I said, "Oh, Mom, I'm scared I've lost them forever. I miss them so much."

"I know you do," she said.

"Is that an old story, too?"

"Yes," my mother said. "The oldest."

"Stories," I said. "It feels like I don't know anything about them. Please teach me something about these stories."

"I already tried to," she said, and then she led me to bed, which is where I made up my mind: I would have to learn something about stories, and fast. My mother wouldn't teach me; that much was clear. My old dad was too far gone to do me much good; that was clear, too. I would have to go somewhere else to learn, and I thought I knew where.

7

I would go to a bookstore. I couldn't go to a library, I knew that, because libraries demand quiet and decorum and I wasn't exactly wired for that: as a child I'd been shushed to death too many times by too many bony librarians in their cardigan sweaters, and I wasn't going back, the way the intelligent bull never goes back to the china shop after that disastrous first or second or third time. But I didn't recall bookstores' requiring any such absolute delicacy, although it's true that I hadn't been to one in twenty years.

But first I had to do something about my hangover. The story of one's first significant hangover is overlong and familiar and I won't add to it here except to say that it felt as though someone had taken their diseased head and switched it with my healthy one. I got out of bed, hopped in the shower, which didn't make my hangover go away but did wet it down some. Someone ― my mother, I assumed and still do