Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [2]
Lewis had trouble accepting this development. Six years had passed since he’d had that drunk-and-disorderly, which wasn’t at all what it sounded like, and three years since the DUI, or almost three, and that was a fluke too. The day he got the DUI, he’d been at the beach with friends and hadn’t had a thing to drink until a minute before they left. They’d been rolling up blankets, gathering trash, when a girl handed him a screwdriver. He drank it down like orange juice, only she must have put a lot of vodka in it that he didn’t taste, because when he was tested, he had a really high blood-alcohol count. Point two.
The drunk-and-disorderly was even more ridiculous. He and one of his mother’s boyfriends had been drinking a little beer and got into an argument in the driveway. They were yelling away, with Lewis’s mother coming out every few minutes to beg them to stop. He didn’t have any idea what was so important that they had to stand there and yell for the whole neighborhood to hear, but he did recall that there was some pleasure in it, a big, freeing fuck-everybody feeling, and neither one of them was willing to give it up. His mom called the cops, and they took both of them to the station. They were joking around in the patrol car on the way down, and probably wouldn’t even have been booked if Elkhart—that was the boyfriend’s stupid name—hadn’t called the cops a couple of pindicks to their faces.
Of all the times Lewis had really tied one on, been truly angry at someone or on the verge of doing something profoundly disorderly, it was absurd that these two incidents were the ones that came over the computer to complicate his discharge from detox. Bobby said he had a few choices: his wife or a relative could come and sign him out, or he had to check himself into some kind of treatment program for alcoholism.
Lewis didn’t have a wife, so he called his mother, who lived sixty miles away, in Sunland. She was on her way to work, she told him, and couldn’t come. She couldn’t come after work, either, or tomorrow, which was Saturday. She couldn’t come get him at all, in fact. “This time, you have to count on somebody else, because I’m letting you down and making a point of it,” she said. “This is a big step for me and I want you to respect it.” Okay then, Lewis said, goodbye, and stood there trying to think why she was so mad at him. He had this guilty, sick-at-heart feeling and kept going through his memories until he found one that matched. Sure enough, he remembered the hundred dollars he borrowed from her three months ago for what was supposed to be three days. Funny thing was, he’d had the money the whole time. He could’ve paid her back. He never got around to finding an envelope, addressing it, buying a stamp.
He sat back down on the plaid couch in the waiting room swamped with shame that he was such a constant disappointment to his mother. Instead of a son, she had a black hole for an offspring, and in their every encounter, he saw, he had never failed to cause her anguish.
Bobby came over and said if Lewis didn’t have any other relatives, or if he didn’t have a hospital program or halfway house in mind, he could always take a bed upstairs for a month. Lewis had no relatives and didn’t know of any programs, but he would kill himself before spending a whole month in detox. Still, to get Bobby off his back, he agreed to go upstairs and have a look.
The detox center, along with other county agencies, was housed in an old junior high school. As he pulled himself upstairs, Lewis saw initials