Page 57 of The October Arrangement

“Dad.” I cocked my head.

“All right.” He picked up his drink. “I stayed because I kept believing she’d get better.”

His answer caught me off guard.

“Even after all those years?”

“Especially after all those years. Your mother wasn’t always the woman you remember. She wasn’t always drinking, and she wasn’t always angry. There was a time when she was happy. She was even funny.”

“Mom?” I frowned.

“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” He smiled. “She could walk into a room and make everyone look at her. She had something about her. I fell in love with that woman.”

“Then explain to me what happened?”

“I wish I knew, son.” He tipped his drink to his lips. “The drinking didn’t happen all at once. That’s what people don’t understand. It crept in. A glass of wine every night became two. Those two glasses became a bottle. Then she started drinking hard liquor. That’s when she hid it.”

“I remember,” I said.

“I know you do. I should have protected you from more of it than I did.”

“This isn’t about me, Dad.”

“It will always be about you for me, son. Every time things got bad enough to the point I thought I couldn’t do it anymore, she’d stop. Sometimes for a week. Sometimes for a month. But she always went back to it.”

“I don’t remember her ever quitting for a day.”

“You were very young then. She’d apologize and promise me she was done. She’d start acting like herself again, and I’d think, there she is. The woman I married was still in there somewhere.”

“Then she’d start drinking again?” I asked.

He nodded and set his glass down. The server walked over and set our plates in front of us.

“You thought you could save her, didn’t you?” I asked.

“For a long time, yes.”

“And you couldn’t.”

“No.” He shook his head and picked up his fork.

“So what about later?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“When you knew she would never change and stop drinking?”

“You want the honest-to-God truth?” he asked.

“That’s all I want, Dad.”

“Because by then, leaving felt like abandoning a sick person. And I wasn’t sure if I could live with that guilt.”

“But she was making us miserable,” I said.

“She made everyone miserable, son.”

“Then why was her happiness more important than yours?”