The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [118]
The AA meeting gets under way and she assumes her attentive posture, listening and nodding, capable of taking in the stories, even while following her own thoughts. There really are only so many variations to addiction stories. Names change, but bottoming out, based on what she hears here, appears to be a largely universal experience. How much longer must she attend? Perhaps she’ll tell Dan she’s moving to Minneapolis. Always tricky to tell such a lie in a small-town city like Baltimore, where people’s paths are forever crossing, but if that day should come, she’ll find a plausible reason to be back here, no? Dan is a pain in the ass and too chummy for her. Maybe all his concern really is part of his role as her sponsor, but she’s dubious.
Take tonight, his insistence on walking her out to her car, as if there’s any danger in this church parking lot.
“I’m glad you’re back,” he says. “Now we just have to worry about Daisy.”
“Daisy?”
“The older woman who used to bring knitting to the meetings. Very Madame Defarge.”
She stares at him blankly, realizing she should recognize the reference, but not caring if he sees it has gone past her. Just like dinner with the Robisons, all those years ago, all that talk, talk, talk flying around the air. Mickey stared into space, defiantly bored by the Robisons, who thought they were so interesting.
“Big woman,” Dan says. “Wore flowery dresses. Smoked clove cigarettes.”
“Oh, yeah.” McKey doesn’t pay much attention to women because they are seldom of use to her.
“Her sponsor tried to call her, but she’s not answering, doesn’t even have voice mail.”
“Maybe she died.”
“McKey!” Dan acts as if she’s making a dark joke, but she was being merely factual. Daisy’s an old lady, probably alone. She could have fallen in her apartment. She could be lying there right now, dead or dying. Does Dan think all the tragedy of the world is linked to drinking? He probably does. He’s built his life around it.
“Be safe,” he says as she gets behind the wheel.
“I always am.”
It’s a haul, getting back to her apartment. It’s a haul getting almost anywhere from this corner of Baltimore, and she wonders, as she has often wondered, how her mother ended up there. Because of Rick, of course. She met Rick, he worked at the Exxon station, and there you have it. Or was it the man before Rick? Rita followed men wherever they led her, yet now she is living man-less in Florida. This must explain her sudden interest in McKey, the messages on her answering machine. Call me, call me, call me. No thanks. Not my problem you’re alone and bored. I’m alone and never bored.
McKey lets herself into her apartment and goes straight to the refrigerator, pours herself a glass of white wine. Nothing like pretending to be an alcoholic to give one a craving for drink. Liquor is like porn to those people, and after listening to them talk about it nonstop, she can’t wait to have a drink, although normally she can take it or leave it. Wrangling drunks at 30,000 feet puts one off alcohol. It was stupid, telling Sean she was in AA with Go-Go. And he probably blabbed to Tim—boys are the worst gossips—maybe even Gwen. Should they meet again, she won’t be able to drink in front of him. And she wants to see him again. Although it would be nice this time if he weren’t so blotto. He was useless.
She examines herself in the mirror, pleased by what she sees. Her body, like her mother’s, is naturally hard, at least for now. Hard is good. Hard is what she strives for across the board. Hard of body, hard of heart, hard of mind. McKey is a warrior, a survivor. She’s ready—for the plane to go down, for a terrorist to pull a knife, for the world to end, for whatever comes. And, increasingly, it feels like something is coming for her, but she’s sidestepped it for now. She’s pretty sure she’s sidestepped it.
But at night, alone in her water bed—her mother’s old bed, a gift McKey accepted from her half brother because she thought it ironic, although she has lost track of what the irony was supposed