One True Love

Jackie woke up the morning of her sixth day craving a drink in a way she hadn’t the previous mornings, her mouth salivating with the desire. Bubbles. She wanted the sweetness of bubbles fizzing on her tongue, followed by that afterbite of crisp sour-sweet. Cheap champagne would do just fine. Maybe with a splash of OJ for the Vitamin C. In fact, she’d give anything to start her morning off with exactly that. Well, not anything. And there, right there, was her problem.

Six days. Jackie had gone for six days now without drinking. Six days since she hauled her husband home from the hospital after having a chunk of his stomach removed. The doctor had told Bud that if he didn’t stop drinking, he would die, and after several breathless moments absorbing that devastating sucker punch of a pronouncement, Jackie leaned over the hospital bed all teary-eyed and desperate and said she’d stop with Bud, that they’d do the quitting thing together.

Sure, she kept drinking until Bud got released, but by the time he lurched through the front door of their house all the alcohol was gone, the fridge clean and stuffed full with healthier options: cans of ginger ale, a gallon of Hawaiian Punch, two-liter bottles of Mountain Dew. When Bud tottered over to the fridge and yanked the door open, he took one long look at those bright containers that replaced his shelves of beer, and he slammed the door shut so hard the calendar jumped free of its magnet.

“I can’t live like this,” he said.

Jackie wanted to slap the teeth from his mouth.

But despite this, despite her hot, bucking anger over how stubborn Bud could be, and how ridiculous, she had to acknowledge the uncomfortable irony that, unfortunately, she didn’t know if she could live without drinking either. She worked as a bartender for crying out loud. How could she survive catering to the litany of drunks without drinking her own self? She supposed she could get another job, but what else could she do in small-town, middle-of- nowhere West Virginia? With her unusual height, she could maybe get a job as a shelf stocker at Walmart or somewhere, though that seemed unbearable. The dull bend and stand, bend and stand, stuffing item after item into their slots on the shelf; repeat, repeat, repeat. She wasn’t cut out for that particular type of tedium, of imprisonment. She’d started waitressing in high school. After five years or so, she’d made the switch over to bartending, and now she’d poured drinks for something like thirty years. She didn’t like her job, but she didn’t hate it, and she figured that was about as much as a person could hope for.

Jackie had taken time off from work since Bud’s incident, the owner himself stepping in to cover for her—an old friend of Bud’s, and Jackie’s too, when push came to shove. He had wanted to do what he could for them, which Jackie appreciated so much her words balled up in her chest and wouldn’t come when she tried to thank him. But tonight, she’d be back in action. Though she had a whole day ahead of her first. Day number six. Sober as a church pew.

She spent the morning sitting on the couch watching the tedious crap that passed for daytime television. Drama for the sake of drama could be so predictable. Bud slumped in a semi- conscious mound next to her. Hand over heart, Jackie hated mornings. There was something grotesque about mornings. All its bright light streaming into the house, exposing stains on the dirty floor, the dusty knots of spiderwebs, peeling wallpaper pricked with mold, and outside birds were screeching and hungry and horny, wheeling through the sky with their inane joy, their

intensity of purpose. Mornings were for those optimistic crackpots who believed in the sanctity of the day. Not Jackie. She knew better.

She scraped through the morning only to be met with a hot afternoon and the purgatorial lethargy that came on after lunch, that dead period of mind and soul between two and four o’clock when her body felt the unbearable weight of a thousand calloused hands on the crown of her head and down across her shoulders. Jackie tried for a nap but she couldn’t fall asleep, nausea crawling up out of her stomach into her hands until they shivered. She needed a drink. God, she could really use a drink.

Not that Jackie was an alcoholic. She had always been very circumspect about her drinking. On a normal work day, Jackie wouldn’t allow herself to drink until right before her shift, one quick drink to soften her outsides and reshape her insides, then one drink for her commute. To drink first thing in the morning on a work day would make her an alcoholic, and she’d be no better than her momma, bless her soul.

When her momma was still alive, Jackie knew to never call or drop by her house after three o’clock, two o’clock really, because by then she’d only find incoherence and meanness. No, Jackie wouldn’t become her momma, so she kept the mornings of her work days clean and sober. Only one day a week or so would she drink in the morning. If it were a special occasion, or if she and Bud went to get a late breakfast. The day before her day off maybe she’d have a couple cold beers with her lunch. There had to be a reason was all she meant. A specific, bona fide reason. Otherwise, she really did wait ‘til four. And only at four, when she had her first drink—usually vodka and OJ, sweet and light, down the hatch with two long sips—only then did the heaviness pushing at her all day begin to lift and a feeling similar to optimism could assert itself.

On her sixth day of sobriety, she poured herself a glass of plain Mountain Dew before work, which tasted flat and sickly sweet and expelled the same chemical scent of Bud’s piss from swallowing down all those medications morning and night. The open refrigerator filled the kitchen with a nostril-tingling odor of decomposition, earthy and sour. Jackie had hauled bags of produce home after the doctor’s lecture on how they needed to eat healthier—fresh vegetables, all the colors, yadda yadda—but Jackie had never been much of a cook, and now the crisper drawer was nothing but a compost pile. She flapped the fridge door shut with an exhausted swing of an arm and busied herself with spreading peanut butter on toast. She drizzled honey across the face in an artistic rendition of her mood: circle, dot-dot, rainbow. A frowning face in sweet, amber-colored stickiness. In the living room, she smacked the plate onto the coffee table before Bud.

“I don’t want that shit,” he said.
“Have you eaten anything at all today?” Jackie demanded.
“My stomach,” he said and clenched his hand into a fist, “is like this.”

The TV flickered with the weather. Sunshine predicted for the weekend. So what? Jackie had nothing to look forward to. On her days off from work, she and Bud liked to lounge on the porch drinking beer with their neighbors. What would they do now? Sip water and slap at mosquitoes? No, thank you. And what about football Sundays this fall? Bud liked to start the morning off with his famous Bloody Marys, meaty and salty from his specialty garnish: strips of crisp bacon shoved thick into the throat of her glass so she had to chew before getting a good sip. But, fine. They’d have to come up with new things to do. What, though? She was peering down the barrel of sixty years old. What did an out-of-shape woman with big school bus hips do in the evenings with a grumpy man whose bones squeaked when he walked?

She shoved the bread and peanut butter closer to Bud.
“You really do need to eat,” she said, her voice going soft.
“Don’t you need to get on to work?” Bud snarled.

Jackie loved Bud; she really did. God, she loved him more than anything. But sober Bud
was a complete asshole.

On her way to the bar, the sky released a brief glut of heavy rain, leaving behind a humid riparian heat. Her clothes turned heavy with moisture as she climbed from her car and waded through the air in the parking lot. Inside, she stood behind the bar, damp and unhappy, pouring drink after drink. Not drinking, while watching people drink, was not wholly dissimilar to waterboarding in Jackie’s unbiased opinion. Her lungs ached with breathlessness, and her bones felt hollow. Her skin itched with a thirst that peeled back her epidermis and gnawed into her flesh and poisoned her blood. She leaned back against the beer fridge and crossed her arms, trying to occupy her mind with other thoughts. A Johnny Cash song ended on the jukebox. The loud pop of a pool ball hitting another echoed through the bar before George Strait started up with a slow strumming whine about some city in Texas that Jackie had never been to, and frankly, never wanted to visit.

A young man dropped down onto the stool in front of her, wielding that rosy, scrubbed look of the freshly showered, a collared shirt buttoned up in a clean line. He had a jaw that could cut butter, and a smile that would melt that butter on toast. He was taller than Jackie, a rare occurrence.

“Brady,” Jackie said with a nod, and then she nodded hello to the redheaded woman who slipped onto the stool beside him and braided her arm with his. Gale Colt and Brady Burnett. They had started coming in together on Tuesdays when margaritas were two for one, radiating that fizzy electric energy of a new couple still in the lust stage of their relationship, which made Jackie so jealous she could spit. Sex, rare before, had become an impossibility with Bud’s half a stomach situation. He couldn’t even muster the strength for a wham, bam, thank you ma’am, sucking air like a pawn-shop vacuum cleaner after climbing the two steps up to their porch, and Jackie had long ceased being the desperate sort of woman who wanted to climb on top and do all the work.

After Jackie mixed two margaritas and poured them into salted glasses, a splash of mermaid-green liquid remained in her shaker. She would usually dump these sorts of leftovers into her own glass and sip them down. Waste not, want not, or however the saying went. But now what? She stared into the hollow of the shaker and considered her options: she could drink only leftovers like this, tiny gulps to keep her mood from sinking. Never full drinks, never shots. She could keep gum or mints in her car to wash the alcohol from her breath before she got home so Bud wouldn’t be the wiser. Alcohol only at work in order to work. Admittedly, yes, she had made a pact with Bud. A no-drinking promise to protect his life. But surely if Bud ever discovered her secret, he would understand. She poured the excess margarita from the shaker and cupped the glass in her hands.

Jackie didn’t survive on alcohol like Bud did. Bud was always drunk or on his way to drunk; she struggled distinguishing between the various gradations of his intoxication. He would drink and drink and still be the same sort of half-sober loopy. His speech mangled. A dark, complicated humor that would sometimes burst into violent haha fury. But Bud knew his limits. He had kept his job at UPS for years, sorting packages all day, uncrooking his tall body one vertebrate at a time after his shift, massaging his fingers out of their gnarl. His job required a man to drink like he did. And Jackie’s job was just the same.

The margarita was moving toward her lips with uneasy resolve when her name came flinging like a razor blade from the other end of the bar. A regular named Saul shook his empty beer bottle at her. She set her glass down.

“What does a man have to do around here to get another beer?” Saul said, and he grinned at her with more gums than teeth. Jackie opened the beer fridge, stooping her tired body toward a bottom shelf. She plunked a new beer in front of Saul.

“Your beer, your highness,” she said with a cross expression, and he gave her a kind smile in return and an indulging laugh, the lonely bovine laugh of a slaughterhouse. Sharp, desperate little squeals. He was a terribly nice man.

Jackie tended to several more empties before returning to the leftover margarita growing warm in her glass. Lord, she wanted a sip, her mouth already pulling with that first swallow. But no, she had made a pact. A pact to be sober for the rest of her life, or the rest of Bud’s life, whichever came first. She had only ever promised him one other thing in her life—to have and to hold, in sickness and in health—so this new vow doubled down on this other vow, and she should be nothing but honored to uphold both of them. Images of what life would be like without Bud populated her mind. Coming home to a dark house. Dropping into an empty bed. Here was the cold hard truth: she couldn’t bear life without him. If she could do something, anything, to prolong his life, well, then, she should. And she would. She dumped the margarita down the sink.

A woman took a seat on a stool. Her hair, the white-grey of goose feathers, curled up into a puffy floof. Jackie turned and poured a Bud Light from the draft pipes into a frosted pint glass.

“First one’s on the house, Ava,” Jackie said with a wink, dropping the glass on the bar, and Ava gave Jackie a rare smile, her teeth blistered with yellow. Ava worked as a cashier at Kroger’s, standing on swollen legs all day, dour but efficient, and she wasn’t the type to be stingy with the plastic bags. Two, three items went into the bag before she’d move onto a fresh one. But Kroger didn’t pay her enough to live, not on her own with no one else helping, so she could never keep up with rent. She went a few months with an apartment, then a few months without to catch up. On her off months, she slept in her car, tucked behind the dumpsters at that Mexican restaurant next to Walmart, a Mickey Mouse blanket draped over the windshield. People used to regularly find her crying in the Walmart toilets after she got off work, but now she came to the bar and drank. Ava seemed happier now. Drinking had a way of turning off those parts of the brain that were crying out for things you could never have.

The bar door banged open, and Roy Bleeker tromped in. He wore a white t-shirt, brand new and still crimped with the folds of packaging. A real cock of man. Not a West Virginian. No, he hailed from some godforsaken town in northern Montana. Roy plopped down on a stool next to Gale. Jackie could tell by how sweat beaded across his forehead that he had already been drinking. She served him a Coors in a bottle anyway. He had lost his wife only a few months before, and the thought of his wife’s death made Jackie’s heart thud with compassion and brought up some of that unquenchable sadness she had felt that day of Bud’s collapse, the ambulance blasting off from their house with Bud strapped inside, lights spinning, sirens whooping, while Jackie tried to get her car started through a scramble of tears.

Jackie prayed to God that day. She really did. Jackie had quit the church when she was a hunched twelve-year-old with a face smeared with acne, already with a set of tits on her that embarrassed women and turned men to goblins. Stuffing her big, hormone-drenched body into ill-fitting dresses—dresses with technically enough fabric, sure, but designed for much smaller bodies—became a weekly task too unbearable to tolerate, and her momma, also tired of trying to find suitable church clothes for Jackie, tired of pretending Jackie was anything other than an oversized anomaly, well she figured they could worship God from home in their sweatpants just as well. Many decades had passed since Jackie dropped her hips into one of those stiff wooden pews, but the afternoon of Bud’s incident, she fell to her knees on sunbaked cement in the hospital parking lot, her hands clenched in a sweaty knob before her chest, and she begged Him to spare Bud. And He did. Now she owed God. Wasn’t that how bargains like those worked? She could begin to repay Him with her sobriety, at the least. And she owed Bud, too. How did she even consider taking that sip of margarita? She was such a weak woman.

Roy sucked on his beer and leaned into Gale in a way that would make Brady stand up from his stool soon.

“Five years I’ve been stuck working on the Mountain Valley Pipeline,” he said to Gale. She smiled a dreamy, distracted smile for no one in particular.

“Wherever you go, there you are,” she said unhelpfully, in that whistlely, flutey voice of hers. Her mother had a voice exactly the same.

“They told me when I signed on, I’d be here two years, max, but look at me now. Five years! You know how many times construction stopped on account of them getting sued? Do you have any idea how many times? My wife hated it here so much it killed her.”

“Last time I checked, lung cancer ain’t specific to West Virginia,” Jackie cut in, her dark mood flicking out like a lash from the hollows within her. She couldn’t help herself. She’d heard this all before, all the different versions as he cycled through revisions until he found the story he liked most.

“It’s the water,” Roy went on, ignoring Jackie and directing a smug little glance at Gale. “The water’s poison from the coal mining. Acid mine drainage. The coal slurry. All the steps of the process turn the water bad, and they don’t really ever get it clean. Just add more chlorine, add more fluoride, right? Did you even know that fluoride causes brain damage? Europe has banned it. Yet the U. S. of A. keeps pumping it into us. You want to know why? Those at the top want us demented and docile.”

“Is that really true?” Gale said. She licked salt from her bottom lip.

“It’s all true, sweetheart. What makes anything wrong or right depends on whose side you’re on. I buy my water at the store now. Big five-gallon bottles. Keep your mouth closed in the shower is all I have to say about West Virginia.”

Jackie rolled her eyes, an overdone performance she made sure Roy registered. She didn’t need Roy’s badmouthing to know what people thought of West Virginia. The prejudice of the outside world came right through the television screen into her living room. But she didn’t care one bit. Everyone needed somewhere else to look down on; that was part of being human, knowing where to shelve yourself within society. She personally looked down on Mississippi. Hated the state. No better than a bucket of mud. It didn’t matter one bit she’d never been there.

“You know,” Roy said with his tourist grin, “I wouldn’t mind it here as much if I could drink with a pretty girl.” He snaked an arm around Gale, who swiftly unplucked his fingers from her waist. Brady’s face went hard.

“Here, Roy,” Jackie said, waving him down her way. “Come sit down here with me. A shot of whiskey on the house.”

“You drinking with me?”
“I’m on the wagon,” she said, her voice firm and loud.

Roy looked offended.
“Scoot on down, Roy,” Jackie said. “I’m feeling lonely.” “Go on,” Brady said, reaching past Gale to give him a shove.

Roy rocked off his stool and tap-danced a few steps toward Jackie to balance himself.

“Whiskey,” Jackie called, and by some delicate miracle, Roy moved her way. She poured out two shots and slid one to Roy as he thumped onto the stool in front of her. He held out his shot to cheers Jackie, and she picked up her glass between her fingers, clinking rims with him and bringing the shot toward her mouth, all habitual motions operating beyond her cognizant recognition of them. When the glass reached her lips, she stopped, coming back into herself. She set the shot down. Roy swallowed his whiskey and exploded with coughing, violent hucks and scrapes, going on long enough and with such unnecessary dramatics, Brady and Gale turned to glare down the bar at him.

“Good stuff,” Jackie said when Roy stopped hacking, her hand still on her glass. She loved whiskey. The smell. Wood and smoke and relief. Roy wiped his mouth with the back of a hand and brought the shot glass to an eye. He peered at Jackie through the cloudy bottom, squinting in concentration as if Jackie were the moon at the other end of a telescope. A dribble of whiskey moved in a halting rivulet down his cheek.

“Every time work on the pipeline stops,” Roy said, setting the glass down, “I think, well, that’s just how life is. Everything ends.”

“The whole southeast and mid-Atlantic will have cheaper natural gas thanks to the pipeline through West Virginia,” Jackie said, reiterating what she had heard on the news, and she leaned back against the cooler, soaking in the satisfaction of delivering such a salient point.

“I heard there’s enough natural gas in the U.S. to last eighty-six years,” Roy said, “and that’s in the whole country, so all this construction, all this fighting, for a pipeline that will probably only be useful for a decade or so.” Roy let out a half laugh, half sigh, his breath chuckling off his tongue. “What’s wrong with us, do you think? Like, as a people?”

Jackie flumped her elbows up onto the bar and spooned her chin with her palms.

“Do you think with your wife gone,” she ventured, “maybe you’re sitting around alone too much, doing too much thinking?”

Roy looked suddenly and unbearably sad, and they exchanged a long, penetrating gaze, opening that door of unique intimacy between drinker and bartender. The moment lingered and stretched, the time around Jackie becoming fluid and strangely personal, quantifiable only in her terms: enough time for her to slow clap four times; enough time for her to juggle three eggs before dropping one. Jackie could only focus on a single eye of Roy’s, so she chose his left and narrowed in on the dark thumbtack of his pupil, his iris’s fractured plate, and deep within his bruise-colored left eye, Jackie found such unexpected tenderness, her eyes watered.

“I think our country’s problem is shame,” Roy said. “Shame is one of the most awful feelings a person can feel, don’t you think? It’s almost intolerable. But if we can do that, face our shame, and, I don’t know, move through it and come out the other side, I think that’s how we fix things.” He tilted his bottle up and finished his beer, his Adam’s apple hopping under his skin. He set the empty bottle down and rolled the shaft between his hands. “But that’s why we drink, right? To hide. To forget.”

“God created us sinners, Roy,” Jackie said. “I don’t know what else to tell you.”

“We’re sure told that, aren’t we?” Roy picked at a scab of dry skin between two knuckles. “I’m not sure what good it does.” He gazed longingly down the bar at Gale, at the flame of her red hair, a scream of life in the dull, damp dark. Jackie replaced his empty Coors with a new bottle, the cold glass hitting the bar with such force, Roy jumped in his seat.

“Do you have dreams?” he said. “Not anymore.”

“But you used to?”

“Sure, in high school I wanted to move out to California and be one of those people who held the boom mic for movies. Someone told me they’d hire you on immediately if you’re tall. But now, I don’t guess I have a good reason to leave town, much less cross state lines. I figure I got all I need right here.” Jackie’s mind flooded with the image of Bud, the bent shape of him on the couch, an elbow-noodle curl, as he laughed at the TV. Her heart squeezed in her chest, and she missed him with a longing so intense she coughed.

“No,” Roy said, a frown pulling at his face. “I mean regular dreams. Dreams at night.” “Everybody has dreams, Roy.”
“I never did. Or I never remembered them anyway. I went to sleep tired and woke up tired. Everything in between was just the cinderblocks of sleep. But lately I’ve been having these intense dreams about my wife. I wasn’t as good to her as I should have been, but she’s kind to me anyway. She says I’m doing fine, says she’s real proud of me.”

Jackie brought a hand to the shot still lingering there on the bar. Her mouth felt as if she’d actually swallowed the whiskey, all tight with flame. She released the glass and slid an ice cube onto her tongue, sucking out cool water.

“But what I’m trying to figure is,” Roy went on, “if she keeps coming to me in my dreams, then what does death mean?”

Jackie wanted to say death means you’re gone, but what a silly thing to say to a man whose wife keeps visiting him in sleep. A flush borne of anxiety rose through her body, hot-cold, like aloe on a sunburn. Where would Bud go if he started drinking again, if he died? She couldn’t bear only having him in her dreams. She’d have to sleep all day. She pushed her whiskey over to Roy who slurped it down quietly without bothering with his usual theatrics.

“I wake up, and I feel like my wife’s been with me,” Roy said. “Like she has just stepped from the room. But I don’t understand what message I’m supposed to glean. That death isn’t real?”

“Of course it’s real,” Jackie said. She picked up a clean glass and dried it with a dirty town. She needed to lie down.

Roy rolled up the sleeve of his shirt to expose his bicep.

“I got this for her,” he said. A tattoo spun out across the flesh in blue ink. Jackie couldn’t immediately make sense of the figure. A female. She appeared to be naked. She had wings.

“Is that supposed to be her?” Jackie asked.
“Who?”
“Your wife?”
“Oh,” Roy seemed surprised. He studied his arm for a few seconds. “No, it’s a Valkyrie.” Jackie shook her head, an I-don’t-care-to-know. She really didn’t. Roy plowed ahead.

“A Valkyrie chooses who lives in battle and who dies. They are the lovers of heroes.” He puffed out his chest a bit at that.

Jackie stroked the image, scribbling her finger across the lines of blue. The same color as veins, that sticky thrum of life. The same color as death. Jackie thought of her mother, who had terrible varicose veins, her blood puddling down her legs in swollen coils. These engorged veins caused merciless pain in her ankles, her feet swelling until her shoes didn’t fit. In her last years, she only wore slippers, even to the grocery store. After she died, six months ago now, a heart attack taking her suddenly and irrefutably, Jackie had to dash out to buy a dress shoe a full size bigger than anything tucked in those shoeboxes stacked in her mother’s closet. She wanted a bit of heel for her mother. Something elegant for burial.

But all the dress shoes were so expensive. So surprisingly expensive. Twice as much at least since she last shopped for a nice heel. No, three times. She stood in that Ross Dress for Less and cried because all the shoes were so expensive. Dress heels were such a stupid shoe anyway, and the ones charging such ridiculous prices were all stupid, wasteful, greedy, self-centered sons of bitches, and she said as much through her tears to the woman standing in the aisle next to her, who looked over with eyes streaked red with fear like Jackie had plans to stab her. Jackie, her tears washing every last bit of energy from her, couldn’t even summon the strength to give that dumb woman the what-for. Instead, she grabbed the cheapest option and got out of there. So her mother ended up buried in an ugly pair of black shoes she would wear forever. Or no. Not forever. However long chemically processed pleather stayed wrapped around bone.

Brady called for Jackie, wanting to settle up, and after he and Gale left, all the youth had been sucked from the bar. Jackie got Saul to agree to run Roy on home, and the bar kept growing in its quiet. The ones who remained that late on a Tuesday had the withered look of too much drink, broken capillaries splintering in full crimson bloom across their graveyard cheeks. They slurped at their drinks with steely resolve, eyes on the televisions, minds elsewhere.

Jackie finally closed up the bar at around midnight and made her way out into the humid dark. Plum-colored moonlight threaded through the gray quilt of low clouds. She was as tired and sober as a Monday morning, but she was proud of herself for not drinking, and she allowed herself a couple of cheeseburgers from McDonalds on her way home as a reward.

When she arrived at the house, all the living room lights were still on, the yellow blaze illuminating the yard fractured by the cracks in the windowpanes. From the driveway, she could hear the rabid screech of the television. Bud had likely fallen asleep with everything on, and this made her so furious, a red heat sprang to her cheeks. After such a long night, and with her paying the power bill all by herself now, Bud could at least pretend to make an effort to keep the costs down.

She marched up onto the porch, maneuvering around soft spots where rot sank black teeth into the wood, and she stomped through the front door. Her eyes took a moment to absorb the scene before her, her pupils clouding with surprise before snapping clear again. A box of Miller Lite sat on the coffee table, and a minefield of empty cans circled Bud’s feet. Her entire body roared with anger. Then panic plunged through her, rapid-fire thoughts painting increasingly somber images on the susceptible canvas of her mind: an ambulance pulling away from their house, the lights gone quiet. Bud’s long pale body tucked into a coffin.

“You shouldn’t be drinking!” Jackie cried.
“Just tonight,” Bud said with a helpless shrug, and he took another sip of his beer.
“I can’t believe you. I really can’t.” Jackie felt the full weight of her fatigue settle into
painful clamps in her shoulders. “The doctor said no more.” “He said occasionally is fine.”
“No, he said quit forever.”
“Did he?”

“We made a quitting pact,” she said. “You and me. Does that mean nothing to you?” Bud didn’t answer, his gaze glued to the television.
“Do you have any idea what work was like for me tonight without drinking?”
Bud drained his beer and accordioned the empty can into a disc between his palms. “I’m making all these sacrifices,” she snapped, “and you don’t appreciate any of it.” Bud turned his head toward Jackie then. His eyes sagged, a ponderous droop of sadness.

His long eyelashes were beaded with mucus.

“I didn’t ask you to do that,” he said quietly.
“But I wanted to!” Jackie cried.
Bud attempted a smile as he stretched for a fresh can.
“Just this once won’t hurt anything,” he said. “Tomorrow, I’ll quit for good.”
Jackie let out a jagged breath and considered this.
“OK?” Bud said. “Tomorrow, you and me. We’ll quit together.”
Jackie really could use a beer. She really, really could. She could relax. She would sleep
better. And like any break-up, maybe they both deserved a night of closure. “You promise?” she asked.

“Tomorrow,” Bud said, smiling. “I promise.”

He passed Jackie a beer from the cardboard container, the can warm and slimy with condensation, and she popped the cap and let the liquid glide down her throat. With each gulp, the image of Bud’s corpse receded, her mind going smooth and quiet, and the aggravations of her day began to release their grip from her body. She reached for another beer and dropped down onto the soft couch, nestling into a cushion, and then she let herself smile for the first time all day, so happy to finally be with her one true love.