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By Root 233 0

Most of the time, she felt she was the only parent who could be trusted to take care of the kids. Jared and Lynn might be old enough to drive, but what would happen if one of them got into some kind of accident while Frank was drinking? Would he hop in the car, strap Annette into the backseat, and race to the hospital? Or what if someone got sick? It had happened before. Not to the kids, but to her. A few years ago, after eating some spoiled seafood, Amanda had spent hours throwing up in the bathroom. At the time, Jared had his learner’s permit and wasn’t allowed to drive at night, and Frank had been on one of his binges. When she was nearing dehydration, Jared ended up taking her to the hospital around midnight while Frank lolled in the backseat and pretended to be more sober than he really was. Despite her near delirium, she noticed Jared’s eyes flicking constantly to the rearview mirror, disappointment and anger warring in his expression. She sometimes thought that he shed a large part of his innocence that night, a child confronting his parent’s awful shortcomings.

It was a constant, exhausting source of anxiety, and she was tired of worrying what the kids were thinking or feeling when they saw their dad stumbling through the house. Or worrying because Jared and Lynn no longer seemed to respect their father. Or worrying that, in the future, Jared or Lynn or Annette might begin to emulate their father, escaping regularly into booze or pills or God knows what else, until they ruined their own lives.

Nor had she found much in the way of help. Even without Al-Anon, she understood that there was nothing she could do to make Frank change, that until he admitted he had a problem and focused on getting better, he would remain an alcoholic. And yet what did that mean for her? That she had to make a choice. That she had to decide whether or not she would continue to put up with it. That she had to form a list of consequences and stick to them. In theory, that was easy. In practice, though, all it did was make her angry. If he was the one with the problem, why was she the one who had to take responsibility? And if alcoholism was a disease, didn’t that mean he needed her help, or at least her loyalty? How, then, was she—his wife, who’d taken a vow to remain with him in sickness and in health—supposed to justify ending the marriage and breaking up their family, after everything they had been through? She’d either be a heartless mother and wife or a spineless enabler, when all she really wanted was the man she’d once believed him to be.

That’s what made every day so hard. She didn’t want to divorce him and break up the family. As compromised as their marriage might be, part of her still believed in her vows. She loved the man he’d been, and she loved the man she knew he could be, but here and now, as she stood outside Tuck Hostetler’s home, she felt sad and alone, and she couldn’t help wondering how her life had come to this.

She knew that her mother was expecting her, but Amanda wasn’t ready to face her just yet. She needed a few more minutes, and as dusk began to settle in she picked her way across the overgrown yard to the cluttered garage where Tuck had spent his days restoring classic cars. Parked inside was a Corvette Stingray, a model from the 1960s, she guessed. As she ran her hand over the hood, it was easy to imagine that Tuck would return to the garage any minute, his bent figure outlined against the setting sun. He would be dressed in stained overalls, his thinning gray hair would barely cover his scalp, and the creases of his face would be so deep they’d almost resemble scars.

Despite Frank’s probing questions about Tuck this morning, Amanda had said little, other than to describe him as an old family friend. It wasn’t the whole story, but what else was she supposed to say? Even she admitted that her friendship with Tuck was a strange one. She’d known him in high school but hadn’t seen Tuck again until six years ago, when she was thirty-six. At the time, she’d been back in Oriental visiting her mother, and while