Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [17]
After five years at Round Rock, Julie had decided to open a recovery house of her own, the White Cottage for Women, over by Somis. When she’d told Red, he was stunned. “I wish you w-well,” he stuttered. “But you have to be crazy to open a drunk farm. If I’d known what I was in for, I never would’ve started Round Rock. But I wasn’t even a year sober. I was crazy. I hope you know it can consume your entire life….”
Today, she looked so satisfied, so radiant, that he knew his advice had been wrongheaded. Then again, for the first four or five years at Round Rock he couldn’t wait to wake up in the morning, and working with drunks had seemed, finally and irrevocably, his life’s calling.
“How are your women doing?” he asked.
“Working with women is a whole different ball game,” she said. “They’re so much more willing to look at themselves, examine their behavior. The egos aren’t so well defended.” There was no remorse in her voice, nor the faintest constriction of regret. “I’m having the time of my life.”
“Lucky you.”
She searched his face. “You still haven’t found anyone.”
“Still looking,” he said, though he hadn’t even interviewed any applicants for Julie’s job. Some kind of mental block, he supposed. A protest at her leaving. Maybe he’d run the whole farm into the ground. That’d show her.
She was on the verge of saying something, Red could tell, but restrained herself. They smiled at each other—he wistfully, she with a little shake of her head—and pushed off down the aisle in opposite directions.
Red stopped next at the auto parts store, the hardware store, the produce stand. In the detox parking lot, he sat in the truck, window cracked, and smoked. The day was cold and clear. He could see down the hill to the ocean and, across the dark blue water, the craggy shadows of the Channel Islands. On one of those islands, a woman had lived alone for a dozen years. A Chumash Indian woman. She’d lived by foraging, snaring fish and game, weathering storms in shallow caves. She’d done fine, too, until rescued. Taken to the mainland, given clothes, a bed, human company, and medical treatment, she died within the year.
APPROACHING the detox reception desk, Red was intercepted by Doc Perrin. “C’mon, Husky,” Perrin said. “We got test results.”
In Julie’s absence, Red had also fallen so far behind on staff medical insurance that the policy had been canceled. To be reinstated, the company told Red, he needed a physical examination. He’d called on Perrin, his sponsor and friend, expecting him to fill out the insurance forms over a cup of detox’s pisswater coffee. Instead, the old sawbones merrily administered an electrocardiogram, a treadmill test, hammered on Red’s knees, listened to his lungs, pinched, prodded, and stuck a finger up his ass.
In Perrin’s office, they sat down across from each other, the desk between them. “You gotta lose forty pounds, friend,” Perrin said with more gusto than Red felt was called for. “And cut out caffeine and stop smoking. And that’s for starters. You get that licked, we’ll work on cholesterol and sugar. First thing, though, you gotta lower that stress level.”
“Right,” said Red.
“Might think about cutting down your work load.”
“Right.”
“Got a new secretary yet?”
“Thinking about it.”
Perrin cackled. “Face it, Blue Eyes. You’re nothing but a dried-out old drunk still hellbent on self-destruction.”
This was hardly news to Red. When his head hit the pillow and he was alone with the sibilance in his lungs and the furious working of his heart, he vowed to quit the coffee,