Chapter One
THERE WERE FORTYAA meetings a week in Jerusalem, PA. That was roughly 400 people per box of not exactly fresh donuts. Probably not a great sign for the overall health of the town—all things considered—but convenient enough for Jonah.
His granny had always told him to shop around. Brand loyalty was for people who didn’t buy the store’s economy beans.
Besides, he didn’t like to get too chummy. People would start to think they were his friend, and the next thing you’d know is they’d remember what he’d said last time. Not what he was here for.
There were also two Al-Anon groups and abunchof Narcotics Anonymous, but they never scratched his itch the same way.
“…woke up in Columbus with a stripper named Arlene and no freaking idea what happened at the conference,” the tall blond woman said. She had long sun-damaged hair in a sloppy ponytail, no makeup, and a dark tan. She looked like a farmer and talked local, but her watch was expensive and scarred up, taken for granted. It was against the spirit of the rules—the whole anonymity thing—but Jonah idly indulged in some private speculation about Blondie’s life. Lawyer, maybe. There was a market for salt-of-the-earth legal representation in a town like Jerusalem. It was the sort of place where everyone’s money came from the dirt one way or another, and they liked to pretend that still mattered.
“Thank you, Deborah,” the leader of the group said, his voice kind and almost aggressively nonjudgemental. “And I see we have a new member here tonight?”
Jonah’s attention had drifted. He pulled it away from old grudges and looked up. Yeah, everyone had turned to look at him.
Well, it was what he was here for.
The chair’s legs scraped on the cheap lino floor of the old church hall as he stood up. It was—at least—the fortieth time he’d done this, but his tongue still felt six times too big for his mouth, and his brain was absolutely 100 percent sure he’d forgotten how to use words.
Good thing he was still fluent in lying. He didn’t even need to prime them. How he looked did most of the work for him—a lanky man in his late twenties with scarred hands and a sunburn on the back of his neck where his sandy brown hair was shaved too short to protect it, old jeans and older boots, construction dust gray on the toes. In Jerusalem, that said down on his luck, manual labor but not that good at it, and the sort of guy who got into fights but lost most of them.
Back home, it would be black mud on his boots, and the assumptions would run differently. He wasn’t home, though.
“My name’s Frank,” Jonah said. “And I’m an alcoholic.”
“Hello, Frank,” everyone rhymed off.
“I’ve been sober for 300 days,” Jonah said. “I’ve never made it a year, and… it kind of feels like I might as well give up now, before I get my hopes up. But every time I lapse, it’s harder to get back up. To getoutagain.”
The group murmured in sympathy and nodded along with him.
“I learned it at my grandma’s knee,” Jonah said. “At the end of my grandpa’s belt. They got whiskey out for guests. Drank away the demons at night at the kitchen table. It never seemed like a problem for them. I don’t know why I’m different.”
Jonah had told the story before. He leaned into the familiar rhythms of it until healmostbelieved it himself. It wasn’t as if he’d made it up out of whole cloth. The bones of it were true. He’d just dressed them up to suit the occasion.
Sure, letting people at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting think he was an alcoholic wasn’t his finest hour. What else was he going to say?
Hello. My name’s Jonah Carrow, and it’s been 300 days since I laid a hex.
Jonah dodged his seatmates' extended hands when it came time to pray. They shuffled toward each other to close the gap in the prayer circle. He left them to the Lord’s Prayer and headed for the refreshment table.
God and Jonah hadn’t been on speaking terms for a few years now. Or ever, depending on how cynical he felt that day. Either way, this probably wasn’t the time or the place to try and change that. People had said he’d tempted fate in the past, but this would be dropping his pants and mooning it.
The pastries hadn’t made it past the first fifteen minutes of the meeting. All that was left were crumbs and grease stains in the bottom of a Dunkin’ Donuts box. The coffee was still hot, though.
Not good, but you couldn’t have everything.
Jonah plucked a plastic cup from the stack and filled it to the brim. His gran’s influence again. She didn’t like coffee, but she’d drunk it black as the devil’s boot every day of her life.Start your day like that,she’d told Jonah,and if anything worse happens to you, then you’re justified in bitching about it.
“I know you, don’t I?” someone said.
The skin over Jonah’s shoulders tightened. He stared into his cup and watched the bubbles spin idly in the center of the coffee—changeable weather to come.
“I don’t know,” Jonah said as he turned around, his mouth curled in an empty smile. “People say I’ve got one of those faces.”
“No,” the neat, faded woman said, her eyebrows pinched together in a quizzical expression as she studied him. “I’m sure I know you. From somewhere.”
She did. Jonah knew her too, now she was face-to-face with him. Not well, he couldn’t have put a name to her face, but they’d been in school together. He remembered that her mom had come to his gran once. He didn’t know why, but she’d arrived with a black eye and left with a smile.
