Page 96 of Cherry Picking

Her eyes flutter shut. “Oh, Murphy.”

“Don’t do that.”

“I’m allowed to care about him, Briggs. He’s the one who drove me to the DMV when I first moved here. He called me every single birthday until he couldn’t.”

I swallow hard, the coffee going down bitter. I clear my throat. “So. Tell me.”

“You’ll get it in the order it happened, otherwise you’ll just take one piece and run with it. Can you actually sit in a room for an hour and listen to me talk? It’s a serious question.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I can sit.”

“Then we start in the spring, and it starts with me.” She sits across from me, her hands folded. “I’m an alcoholic,” she says simply. “I was drinking heavily long before anything ever happened with your brother.”

I blink. “How long before?”

“Two years, give or take.” She taps the side of her cup. “You were gone nine months out of twelve. I had a four-bedroom house, no job, and a fiancé who lived on television.”

I frown. “You had people here. Friends.”

“I had your people. Your dad, Ziggy, the guys you played juniors with. They were lovely, Briggs, but they all knew you first.” She shrugs. “I moved into your life and let mine fade away.”

“You never said anything.”

“Briggs.”

“You didn’t.”

“I said I was lonely. Constantly. In this kitchen, on the phone, at your father’s table in front of everyone.” Her voice is steady. “You bought me plane tickets. You bought me a new car. The last time I told you I was struggling, you asked if I wanted to go look at dogs.”

“I was trying to help.”

“You were trying to solve it. There’s a version of you that hears a problem and goes straight to the easy solution.” She sets the cup down. “You did it for four years, and I let you, because it felt like being taken care of, and I was too ashamed to admit it wasn’t enough.”

I have nowhere to put my hands. It’s the same thing my father said, packaged differently, and I hate it just as much.

“I would’ve come back to take care of you.”

“You’d have come home for a broken bone or a funeral. I couldn’t find a way to say I’m drinking alone at 4:00 p.m., and I can’t stop in a way that sounded like an emergency. So I didn’t try.”

“Ophelia, I—”

“Don’t. Not yet.” She raises a hand. “I went to my first meeting in March, three years ago.”

“I thought things were fine then.”

“Yeah, well, I got pulled over at eleven in the morning coming back from the grocery store. The cop let me go, and I sat in a parking lot for an hour and a half.”

My chest constricts. “Jesus.”

“There’s a church off Windmill with a noon session. I went because I had ninety minutes to kill, and I was too terrified to drive home. That’s the whole start of it.”

“Did you tell anyone?”

“I told a room full of strangers, which was easier than I thought it would be.” She takes a long, slow breath. “He was already there.”

I go rigid. The room feels suddenly very small. “How long?”

“Five months. He had his chip and everything.” She watches me process it. “He got up for coffee at the break, and I have never seen a person’s face do what his did. Afterward, he stood with me in the parking lot for forty minutes because neither of us could find the right words. Then he said, well, this is the shittiest possible way for this to happen. I laughed so hard I had to sit on the curb.”