I told myself I was handling it.
I was not handling it.
One glass of wine at night, to take the edge off after the second shift, had become two and then three and then a habit I stopped counting because counting was too honest. By twenty-five I was hiding bottles. By twenty-six I had lost the first job and was close to losing the second and my mother had started looking at me with the specific expression she wore when she was afraid to say something that needed to be said.
The woman who helped me get sober was named Carol, and she ran an AA meeting on Tuesday nights in the basement of St. Augustine’s on Clemens Street, and she was fifty-eight years old and had been sober for twenty-four years and she told me, at my first meeting, that I didn’t have to do this in one piece. That it was okay to put it down in pieces.
I’m going to tell you that the first piece I put down was the drinking.
