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I pushed the knife through the onion. The knife thwacked against the maple cutting board. Thwack. Another cut. Thwack. Thwack. Carl and I struggled alone in this oversized house. I moved the knife slowly through the layers as the pungent odor burned the inside of my nose. I sniffled and wiped my stinging eyes with the back of my hand.

I finished chopping, but tears plopped on the cutting board. I’m a well of emptiness. The truth rumbled in the hollowness like an earthquake. It cracked open the walls of my heart, and sand poured through like trying to fill a sieve.

Carl and I weren’t going to make it through this together. We had too many spaces in ourselves and in our marriage.

We shared painful closet experiences.

Molly and Devin shared intimacy.

It wasn’t about the sex.

It was about the intimacy.

47

So, how was your day?

Fine, thank you.

I’m having twins, and my friend's having cancer.

I told Rebecca after the AA meeting that if I hadn’t been in recovery, I don’t know how I would’ve made it through that day. As usual, no-frills Rebecca reminded me pronto, “You wouldn’t have made it. You would have been drunk.”

We talked about Step 4: Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. Rebecca told me to think of it as cataloging the closet of our souls. Another closet. I told her the inventory might be searching, but I couldn’t promise fearless, at least not without a drink or two or ten. The 12 Steps are clever though. The first three suck you right in, and then they slam you with this one. Right about the time you’ve got a grip on this sobriety business, they send you to a step that makes you want to dip your Big Book in a barrel of beer. Here's the deal breaker as I saw it. No Step 4. Then no Steps 5-12. Step 4 was the gatekeeper step. Without it you couldn’t climb the rest.

A sufficient explanation for me. I wouldn’t sacrifice eight steps because I balked at spilling out my guts on paper. I’d spilled them out for years in toilets and yards all over the country.

I called Molly and asked if she wanted to go shopping while she still had hair. “My maternity clothes won’t make it through twindom. Besides, it's not healthy for you to stay inside and think about your boob all day,” I said. Before I left, I dumped everything out of my “go to AA purse,” a large hobo, which held my Big Book, a steno pad for notes, pens, a few pieces of chocolate, and the usual wallet, lipstick, keys. Retail therapy required a smaller option, which I’d bought not long before my addiction therapy. I tossed a few essentials into my snazzy Coach metallic crossover purse, then went to my closet to find my credit card wallet. It looked more pregnant than I did. I opened it and flipped through dozens of my little plastic tickets to happiness. A euphoria I now realized I paid for some nights with my body.

I looked at my Big Book, dumped on my bed with my other purse paraphernalia, looked at the wad of credit cards, and headed to Carl's office. I fed the credit cards to the paper shredder one by one as the steel cutters grinded their satisfaction. And with each one, I whispered a prayer for the strength to avoid temptation.

I walked out of the house, my purse and my soul leaner.

Carl called my cell as I turned into Molly's driveway. He said he’d left the site and would be home by dinner. He told me he needed to talk to me—one of those generic, ambiguous statements that created macramé with my internal body parts. His responses to my questions sounded clipped and abrupt, like the gardener had sheared them with hedge trimmers. I wondered if he had arrived at the same realization about our marriage. Or our lack of one.

I didn’t tell Molly about the plastic card slaughter or Carl's news. I didn’t tell her I struggled with when and how and where to tell Carl that I wanted to leave. She needed relief from drama more than I did right now.

We spent two hours flinging clothes around in the