Page 21 of The Lipstick Flip

And maybe it was the divorce, even though it didn’t take. Maybe it was those last months we’d been together, leading up to the divorce. Maybe it was just because I was an ornery son of a bitch. “It sounds like I win. I don’t know what you’ll get out of it.”

“You’ll pay me back with interest,” Noah said with that same there-and-gone-again smile. “And we get rid of the house. And the most important part, Howie, is it gives me a reason to tell my mom I won’t be able to spend as much time with them while they’re in town.”

I stared at him. And slowly, a laugh worked its way out of me. “Holy shit.”

Noah shrugged, and then he pretended to flick long hair over his shoulder.

“How the fuck are we supposed to work together?”

“We make a great team. You’re all butch and whatever. And I can do the useful stuff.”

In spite of myself, I was grinning. “A great team, huh? I guess you don’t remember when we tried to pick out a couch.”

Two months.

Two months of looking at couches. Talking about couches.

Two months of hearing every pro and con for every fucking couch in existence.

Two months of talking about if we should buy the model we liked and then have it reupholstered because nobody sold a couch in blue corduroy.

Good Christ. If I hadn’t loved him so much, I would have murdered him. And then done myself in. Just to never have to think about a couch again.

Noah made a dismissive sound. “That was different. That was important.”

It was a terrible idea. I knew Noah. I knew myself. I knew how it was going to work out.

The clouds must have thinned, because the daylight coming through the window raised the gold in his hair. I was still smiling, and I wondered when the last time was that I’d smiled this much. Wondered what was wrong with me. I took the bunny hat, put it on him, and squared up the ears. I gave one a flick. I was still smiling, and I decided it was because I needed sleep. Because this was definitely a mistake.

Which was why I said, “Fuck it. All right.”

8

There were NA meetings in the basement of the United Church of Christ, but once I’d run into Theo there, so I’d started driving a little farther to give us both some space. Not that we weren’t friends now. Not that we didn’t see each other. But the whole point of Narcotics Anonymous was, well, the anonymous part. And it didn’t help either of us to see the other one there.

So, now I went most weeks to a meeting out at The Oaks at Emerald Point, which was a fancy name for a trailer park. They had an office building with what they called a “clubhouse,” and you could book it for free if you were a tenant. So, we had it from seven to nine, and Theo wasn’t there, and I didn’t have to be anybody but myself.

The clubhouse was one of those rooms with cheap paneling and bad fluorescents, and they never should have put in carpet, much less the high-pile stuff that was the color of thrown-up oatmeal. You could see where people walked, the carpet flattened over time into tracks: to the snacks and coffee table, to the circle of chairs, to the restroom. The smell of the coffee mostly covered up the smell of whatever the office manager had heated up for her supper that night. I didn’t know anything about the woman except she apparently loved microwaved tuna.

If you went to enough meetings, you saw the same faces. Not just the regulars, but the ones who came once and then shied away again, or who came for a while and then stopped. The regulars all said hi to each other, and I shook hands with Ed and Suzanne and a couple of the other guys. We got our coffee. Ed stirred one of those packets of hot chocolate into a foam cup of hot water. It was all shooting the shit until the meeting started. The ones who weren’t regulars—the ones who were new, or the ones who had come before, the faces I recognized, well, they had different ways of being there. A guy who must have been in his thirties—still looking fit, nice arms, but face and eyes like he’d been living rough—stood stiffly at the back of the room, arms folded across his chest, shooting looks at anybody who tried to come close. A woman with stringy hair, a quarter-zip, and nylon booty shorts slunk into the room, head down as she tried to make her way to a seat without anybody noticing her. Another woman, heavyset, with hair in a perfect black bob like a doll’s, looked like a fucking ghost. She made it two steps before she hugged the big round trash can and started vomiting loudly. I took a step, but Ed waved me off, and he and Suzanne went over and took her to the bathroom.

When it was time to start, I sat, and I let myself sink down into—well, I wasn’t sure. Some place inside myself that was kind of paying attention but also kind of free to…not. I wasn’t sure I needed to go to a meeting every week anymore. It had been a long time since I’d used. But Ed said the first sign you needed to go to a meeting was when you thought you didn’t need to go to a meeting. Si just said if you thought you were cured, you were a dumbass. So, here I was. Week after week. And I said my name. Said I was an addict. And for the most part, I listened.

Bob was in his forties. He was here almost every week, and he ran a computer repair shop—not just replacing screens on phones, he’d told me one time, but the real stuff, fixing laptops, whatever that meant. Because he had a degree in computer engineering. And he looked like he had a degree in computer engineering. He was still trim, and he wore khakis and a button-up. No glasses, but he had his hair like Bill Gates. What my dad would have called a dweeb.

“—and they said they were sisters, and they asked if I wanted to party,” Bob was saying. “Keep in mind, the only girls I ever hooked up with were the ones I met at parties, and that was only after everybody got high. We drank for a while, right there in the park, and after a while we went back to their house. Empty stomachs, too, because we didn’t have any money for food. But we had money for weed. We went back to their place. We smoked. We drank. I blacked out, and when I woke up, it was morning, and I was lying on the ground outside in nothing but my underwear.”

The stringy-haired woman was mopping her eyes; she’d been crying since the meeting started.

“I was lucky enough to find a blanket, so I wrapped myself up in it, and then I got to the back door. I started knocking and knocking because I knew the girls would still be asleep, but I needed my clothes and my wallet and my keys. Finally, this old man came to the door. He was carrying a bread knife. That was when I figured out I was at the wrong house. God, I didn’t know what was wrong with me, so I said I was sorry, like I could apologize for scaring this man out of his mind, and I started to leave.” Bob shook his head. “He shouted after me, and I couldn’t understand what he was saying at first. And then I got it. He wanted me to leave their barbecue cover. Because that’s what I was wrapped up in—not a blanket.”

He laughed. Some people laughed when they shared. In part, because yeah, sometimes there was something funny about finding yourself neck-deep in the shit you made for yourself. But the woman with the stringy hair was still crying.

I was down in that place inside myself. Not thinking, not exactly. Not planning. But…drifting. Kind of waiting for it, for whatever might pop up. Because sometimes, you just needed to say something out loud. For yourself. And maybe for somebody else in the room. You remembered things, and it was like seeing them through a piece of glass. Putting a piece of cardboard under Micky because I knew he was going to shit himself in the middle of the night. The fucking roach motel—closed, abandoned, boarded up and you’d better fucking believe off limits, which was why we could stay there when we didn’t have anywhere else to stay. And somehow it still had scalloped curtains hanging over the sliding glass doors. Someone had written JESUS LOVES ME and drawn a face on the electrical outlet. And if you lay down and turned your head just right, you could see the Big Dipper.

Jillene was next; another regular. She was a hair stylist or hairdresser or whatever you were supposed to call them, and she had told us once that it cost her eight hundred dollars a month to rent a chair at the salon where she worked. And one month, she’d spent the eight hundred dollars on meth, figuring she could sell it, but she’d spun up instead, and she’d left her purse somewhere, with all the meth still in it, and after she’d come down, she couldn’t find it again.

She was halfway through her story; it was one I’d heard before, about her ex leaving her, about living in her house while she was trying to sell it, and waking up every morning to put away any sign that she was still living there. “—came around the back of the house because I had to get something out of the shed, and I happened to glance in the window. And I saw a mattress on the floor, and a filthy pillow, and a pipe, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, some crazy drug addict is squatting in my house.’ And then I realized it was me.”