Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [39]
Libby wedged a split oak log into the fire. “If Red’s so great, Billie, why don’t you go for him?”
“What do I need a man for? I’ve got all the money I could ever want. I’ve got Little Bill and Dad and you. And besides, Red and I aren’t a good match. I don’t mind that he’s—”
“Old and fat?”
“Built for comfort, let’s say. But he’s too good for me, too pure. Monkish or something.”
“And you think that suits me?”
“You’re good, too,” said Billie.
“Oh, right.” Libby turned to leave. She had to get home, go to sleep, and be back at work, all in eight hours. “That’s okay. I’m resigned. This may well be a long dry spell when it comes to men.”
DURING the first four months of his sobriety, Lewis had suffered from more or less constant low-level pain. Something was always aching. He moved his head and a clear, electric flash of pain shot down his spine. Other times, the pain seemed to rise out of his blood like a fog. The roots of his hair hurt, or his teeth. Sometimes his entire skin seemed tender to the touch. He gobbled aspirin by the handful and found that lying facedown on the ground worked wonders. Floors were okay, but grass, even asphalt or dirt, was better. When he was flat out against something solid and gritty, inhaling the smell of soil and rocks, the pain seeped out like moisture.
“I know exactly what you’re talking about,” Red said when Lewis described his symptoms. “When I first got sober, I thought I had the flu all the time. Come to find out, I was angry.”
According to Red, the pain was part of Lewis’s detoxification: as residual alcohol was leaving his system, the anger he’d avoided by drinking was now surfacing. What would help him through the long, slow process of shedding this anger was an inventory of everything and everybody he felt uncomfortable about—Red suggested he write separate lists of grudges, fears, money problems, sex problems, and secrets. “That’ll bring all this unresolved crud to light,” Red said. “Often the light alone makes it shrivel up, like pulling weeds and leaving them in the sun.”
Before he went to sleep at night, Lewis composed a list in his head. Money, starting with outstanding debts. Better than a sleeping pill.
BEING the new secretary of Round Rock was okay. To make order from someone else’s chaos was satisfying. He did everything from updating client files on the computer to fetching Frank from his rambles, and was in charge of making follow-up calls to track the progress of former Round Rock residents. Against his better judgment—it seemed like prying—he routinely asked men if they were sober, going to meetings, and weathering crises without drinking.
He went with Red on supply runs, ostensibly to learn the route. Red had sold him the reconditioned Fairlane for two hundred dollars so he could make the runs himself; but after several months, for sociability’s sake, they were still doing them together. Lewis was using the Fairlane mainly to commute from Rito, where he had rented a room in the Mills Hotel. Red had tried to talk Lewis into staying on at the farm, even offering to refurbish a bungalow in the village for him. But after ninety-six days and four roommates at the Blue House, Lewis wanted more freedom and more privacy.
Living at the Mills, Lewis found, was not, in fact, all that different from living at Round Rock, though the architecture wasn’t nearly so grand and the Mills’s winos were still putting away the quarts of Tawny Port. The important thing was, Lewis had his own room—single bed, bureau, wobbly desk, minimal bathroom—and no curfew. And no rules about women, either.
He drank his first cup of coffee each morning at the grocería, leaning against the counter as Victor Ibañez delivered a crash course in small-town life. “That Fairlane you’re driving? Used to belong to old Tillie Prouch,” said Victor. “She’s been legally blind for years, but kept nosing her way downtown every day for mail and groceries. Then the county put