Best Kept Secret: A Novel

Over the next few weeks, a natural rhythm evolves to my days. On the days I work at the cafe, I rise at around five o’clock so I can make it to my shift at 6:00. I slip on a swishy, black skirt and white, button-down blouse, flip my hair into a quick updo, and head out the door. The morning shift is decidedly unglamorous, but I love it.

“Let me set up your caffeine IV,” I joke with the surly, sleep-deprived customers as I pour coffee into thick, white restaurant mugs. This comment almost always earns me a smile and at least a twenty percent tip. Le Chat Noir is popular among the nearby business set; on a good day, working both breakfast and lunch, I go home with a couple hundred dollars in my pocket.

“You’re a natural,” Serena says. “Like you’ve been doing this all your life.”

“I’m just acting out the part of sassy waitress,” I tell her. In that sense, I suppose I have been doing it all my life. Acting out my part. The good daughter, the good student, the good wife. Whatever the situation demanded of me, that’s what I became. The situation I’m in demands I find a way to pay my bills, and writing wasn’t cutting it.

“I feel really strange about it,” I say to Vince one night after a meeting. “It’s everything I’ve ever worked for. But I just don’t think journalism is really what I want to do.”

“It’s okay for you not to know what you want to do with your life,” he tells me with a grin. “Just as long as you’re not sitting on your ass drinking.”

As soon as I get the yard cleaned up and all the painting done, Derek gets my house listed for sale and we begin looking for an appropriate townhouse or condo for me to buy. I spend my Wednesday nights with Charlie, and the weekends he is with me we work on sorting through all our things in preparation for an eventual move.

“I want to keep all of my toys, Mommy,” he says.

“We won’t have room for all of them, sweet boy,” I say, reaching over to touch his soft cheek. “You can fill these two boxes with everything you really, really want and the rest we are going to give away to other little kids who don’t have any toys to play with.”

“And that will be a very nice thing for me to do,” he says, repeating what I’ve already told him.

“Yes, it will.” I give him a big hug. “I’m very proud of you, Charlie. You are a very nice little boy.”

“Yep!” he says with a confident smile, and he puts another toy in the box.

When I get home from my shift at the cafe on the Thursday in the second week in July, I call Scott to ask if Mr. Hines has sent over his report. “I haven’t seen anything from him yet,” Scott says. “I promise to call you the minute it lands on my desk. You have Charlie this weekend?”

“Yep,” I say, my cell phone tucked between my shoulder and ear as I rinse out my coffee cup, glancing out the kitchen window at the newly flowering forsythia in the corner of my yard. A true Northwest summer has finally tiptoed in—slightly overcast mornings balanced by bright and sunny afternoons, verdant foliage, and sweet, cleansmelling air. I’ve heard it said that if you don’t like the weather in Seattle, just wait a minute and it will change. A little bit like my moods. “Charlie’s coming here,” I tell Scott.

I hear the shuffling of papers in the background. “Have you heard anything from your own mother? I haven’t gotten any notes from Mr. Hines about their meeting, either. It was yesterday, right?” There is an edge of panic in his voice.

“It’s tomorrow, actually. And she’s coming over for brunch with Charlie and me on Sunday. I’ll talk with her then, okay?” I set my mug upside down next to the sink to let it air dry. My mother sent me an e-mail earlier in the week, asking if she could bring Charlie and me breakfast “so we could talk.” I am trying not to take it as a foreboding sign that she didn’t just call me and tell me what she was going to say to Mr. Hines.

“You can think of it however you want to,” Nadine said when I called to talk with her about it. “You can imagine the worst or the best. It’s your choice.”

“Everything’s always a choice,” I said, a little annoyed she didn’t offer me the comfort I’d been looking for.

“Ah,” Nadine said. “Now you’re starting to get how this whole program works.” I hung up slightly irritated, but with a smile, which was becoming par for the course at the end of my conversations with my sponsor.

“Sounds good,” Scott says now. I hear more paper being shuffled, someone whispering to him in the background.

“I’ll let you go,” I say.

“Sorry if I’m distracted,” he says. “I’m due in court in an hour. You’re doing great. I’ll talk to you soon.”

I hang up, then immediately call Alice’s house. I want to tell my son I can’t wait to see him. I drop into my chair, listening to the phone ring and ring. No one answers. I set my phone down on the desk, maybe a little more forcefully than I should, resentful that I’m not part of his daily schedule. I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing. There is something inordinately wrong with a mother not knowing exactly where her child is at any given moment. I say all of this to Andi later in the afternoon during my individual session.

“Holding on to resentments is like drinking poison and hoping the other person will die,” she says after I’ve had my little tirade. “That kind of anger is a luxury an alcoholic can’t afford to have. It’s toxic.”

I throw my hands up in the air, then drop them into my lap. “Great. I’m not only an alcoholic, I’m a toxic alcoholic.”

Andi shrugs, tucks the sheet of her long black hair behind one ear, showing off sparkling silver hoops. She doesn’t appear impressed by my first time admitting to her that I am an alcoholic. I hoped for a little more hoopla, considering how long it took me to say the words out loud. I imagined the swell of violins in the background, a dramatic, emotional crescendo reached as I finally find the courage to admit the truth about who I am to my treatment counselor. No such luck. “Well,” she says instead, matter-of-factly, “you know what happens when you take the alcohol out of the alcoholic, don’t you?”

I shake my head almost imperceptibly, gritting my teeth. “No, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

“You’re left with the ‘ick,’ “ she says, then tells me my time is up.