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“No way, dude. Give me your keys. Call someone to come get you,” he said.
“I can drive.”
“See down there at the end of the counter? You recognize Big Bob Colts, don’t you?”
“Yeah. He’s a cop,” I slurred.
“Right, and unless you want me to have him call in one of his on-duty friends to stop you before you get out of the parking lot, you’re going to give me those keys.”
“Ri-right,” I said, realizing he was talking good sense even in my drunken stupor. “I’ll just walk it ufff.”
“You do that. Keys will be waiting on you when you sober up.”
“A’ight,” I managed, wobbling toward the door. I tossed my hand up in his general direction as a gesture of goodbye and stumbled out into the parking lot, then headed toward the small two-lane road that ran beside the bar.
It was a good four miles to my house, but I decided I needed to see Rain instead. She was closer, and I needed her to talk to me. That’s the last thing I remember before waking up on her sofa the next morning. There was a note on the table beside me telling me to get my shit together and get out. I called Donnie and went to wait for him over at the house next door, hungover and horrified that I couldn’t remember what I’d said or done there last night. Whatever it was couldn’t be good, or I wouldn’t have woken up on the sofa with a note telling me, in essence, to fuck off.
Donnie took me to get my truck. The bar was closed, but knocking on the front doors got the owner, who was inside cleaning, to let me in. He gave me a lecture and my keys before sending me on my way. At home, I showered and packed a bag. I tossed it in the back seat of the Barracuda and left. For the cabin.
20
Rain
Jon’s arrival at my house the night before had caught me off guard. At first, I thought he was back to try to talk things out again, but when I opened the door and caught full sight of him, I realized that he was stinking drunk. He smelled like a man who’d been on a weekend binge and looked worse. Looking out behind him, I realized neither his truck nor car was in the driveway.
“Jon, how did you get here?”
“Walked.”
His breath was enough to knock out a Brahman bull, and his clothes looked like he had slept in them. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I couldn’t leave him out on the porch in this condition. I pulled him inside and sat him on the couch before getting him a bottle of water to hydrate himself. He looked like he was about to pass out. Whether that was from drinking or walking however far he had come was unclear.
His speech was so incoherent that I gave up trying to get anything out of him and just got him a pillow and a blanket to sleep it off on the sofa. When I got up in the morning, he was still there, snoring and reeking up the place. It wasn’t a pretty side of him and one I had never seen before, which was even scarier. On some level, I was concerned, but my anger at his making everything I had told him yesterday about himself, forcing me to take care of him in his current state, overrode my concern. I wrote him a note and left. My mobile vet truck was ready, and Becky was coming to pick me up so I could drive it back home.
As much as I wanted to not think about him, as pissed off as I was, I couldn’t shake him from my thoughts all day. It was obvious that he was not handling things well, and that worried me. I told Becky about it on the way to town.
“You don’t think he’s using again, do you?”
“Using? Using what?”
“Drugs.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I—I don’t know what to say, Rain. Maybe you should ask him yourself what’s going on.”
“Jon doesn’t have a drug habit.”
“Well, no. Not now. At least, I hope not.”
None of this was making sense to me. “Why would Jon be on drugs? He’s an asshole, and I’m newly concerned about his drinking, but drugs? Really? Have I been gone that long?”
“Yes, you have. But this goes back further than that, and you know it.”
“Becky. You’re going to have to say what you mean, because I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Drugs. Why he left town way back when we were in high school. You do know. I’m not saying it’s a thing again, but—”
“No,” I shook my head. Drugs? I wasn’t sure if this made anything that had happened back then better or worse. Worse, probably. “No. I have no idea what happened back then. I never did then, and I still don’t know. He won’t talk about it. He just said he had some issues and ran away, that he was overwhelmed and did some things he regretted. I know he spent some time in jail for doing something stupid, but I don’t even what that was about. I think he was ashamed, and now that I’m saying all this out loud—I’m in love with a guy who’s been in jail for I don’t even know what, who’s had a drug problem I haven’t known about for years—I am certainly feeling a sense of shame myself. Are you kidding me?” I didn’t want it to be true, but I needed to know if it was. “Be straight with me, Becky.”
