Freedom [148]
Lalitha was in buoyant spirits as they sailed in their rental car up the big fifteen-mile grade on I-64, a phenomenally expensive piece of federal pork brought home by Senator Byrd. “I am so ready to celebrate,” she said. “Will you take me celebrating tonight?”
“We’ll see if there’s a decent restaurant in Beckley,” Walter said, “although I’m afraid it’s not likely.”
“Let’s get drunk! We can go to the best place in town and have martinis.”
“Absolutely. I will buy you one giant-assed martini. More than one, if you want.”
“No but you, too, though,” she said. “Just once. Make one exception, for the occasion.”
“I think a martini might honestly kill me at this point in my life.”
“One light beer, then. I’ll have three martinis, and you can carry me to my room.”
Walter didn’t like it when she said things like this. She didn’t know what she was saying, she was just a high-spirited young woman—just, actually, the brightest ray of light in his entire life these days—and didn’t see that physical contact between employer and employee shouldn’t be a joking matter.
“Three martinis would certainly give new meaning to the word ‘headache ball’ tomorrow morning,” he said in lame reference to the demolition they were driving up to Wyoming County to witness.
“When was the last time you had a drink?” Lalitha said.
“Never. I’ve never had a drink.”
“Not even in high school?”
“Never.”
“Walter, that’s incredible! You have to try it! It’s so fun to drink sometimes. One beer won’t make you an alcoholic.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about,” he said, wondering, as he spoke, if this was true. His father and his older brother, who together had been the bane of his youth, were alcoholics, and his wife, who was fast becoming the bane of his middle age, had alcoholic proclivities. He’d always understood his own strict sobriety in terms of opposition to them—first, of wanting to be as unlike his dad and brother as possible, and then later of wanting to be as unfailingly kind to Patty as she, drunk, could be unkind to him. It was one of the ways that he and Patty had learned to get along: he always sober, she sometimes drunk, neither of them ever suggesting that the other change.
“What are you worried about, then?” Lalitha said.
“I guess I’m worried about changing something that’s worked perfectly well for me for forty-seven years. If it’s not broke, why fix it?”
“Because it’s fun!” She jerked the wheel of the rental car to pass a semi wallowing in its own spray. “I’m going to order you a beer and make you take at least one sip to celebrate.”
The northern hardwood forest south of Charleston was even now, on the eve of the equinox, a dour tapestry of grays and blacks. In another week or two, warm air from the south would arrive to green these woods, and a month after that those songbirds hardy enough to migrate from the tropics would fill them with their song, but gray winter seemed to Walter the northern forest’s