Nervousness hung like cigarette smoke in the corner basement apartment on a triple intersection near a bridge to a whole different country.
Becky was one hundred and twelve days clean and twenty-nine days living in a big city for the first time in her life.
Leigh-Ann wasn’t clean, clean but promised her sister she’d be on her best behavior for a first visit.
They had been to the city as kids for concerts and fireworks, their father clutching their hands too tightly and inventing new racist terms every fifty feet.
His old angry ticker had given out, and while it was kind of a relief not to have a gruff, paranoid man around all the time, Becky had drifted into the Tweak Valley Crew and wound up learning entirely new corridors of paranoia and delusion.
They ordered Thai food because Leigh-Ann had never had it before and Becky attempted to make the weird lemon and apple pie their second stepmom used to make, but she botched it badly and they walked to the liquor store for ice cream.
Becky saw Leigh-Ann eyeing the booze, and let her get a little double shot bottle.
On the way out a black man old enough to be their great-grandfather told Leigh-Ann she looked good. Leigh-Ann had visibly shuddered.
Back in the apartment, despite the small bracer of vodka, Leigh-Ann anxiously started listing reasons that Becky should move back home up north.
Becky was chewing her lip like it was a product made to be chewed.
“If Kraig Willett stood outside the store down here and told you you looked good, we’d be carrying boxes of your stuff in here right now, and hanging your damn posters,” Becky said, removing the anger from her voice the way one of her counselors suggested.
“Well, he ain’t down here. I don’t know how you deal with all the honking. Erry twenty seconds there’s a honk. I’d go crazy.”
Becky thought about her response, carefully. She knew she wasn’t ever going home to a place where a dozen men and a few boys had paid money to have sex with her in a trailer or a pickup truck.
She didn’t know if she could make Leigh-Ann understand.
She realized that was out of her control.
She just had to tell the truth.
“When I hear the horns, you know what I think?
Leigh-Ann cocked her head just enough to let Becky know she was listening.
“I think,” Becky said “someone’s got someplace to go that’s important to them. A job that pays good money. A momma that is waiting to hug them… I dunno…choir practice. Something. Something better than hopping a fence near a trailer by the reservoir to smoke meth for three damn days.”
Leigh-Ann grimaced.
“I just think you’d be safer back home.”
Becky shook her head and let out one weak chuckle.
Brakes squealed and Leigh-Ann winced.
“Ain’t as much danger outside my door,” Becky said, tapping her temple with a finger that had lit a thousand pipes, “as there is right in here.”
***
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Seems Becky’s allergic to her hometown. Great story.
An audible “wow” from me, reading this alone. Do folks who don’t live with addiction and/or mental illness get that there is nothing on earth that rivals what goes on in your head? Do those who do get that no matter where you move, your head comes with you? You’ve done it again, Dr. Jimmy