C.E. Murphy - Truthseeker

“For dinner! We’re not supposed to be there till one. You can buy me lunch first.” Lara knocked her hip against Kelly’s, sending her around to the driver’s side door. “This, by the way, is how I stay skinny. I never get to eat a whole meal at once.”

“You’re not skinny.” Kelly unlocked the doors, dismayed as they got in. “My nice new seats, all wet!”

“It’s your own fault,” Lara said heartlessly. “You’re the one who wanted to go chasing men in the rain.”

“Just for that, I take it back. You are skinny.” Kelly pulled out of the parking spot, shaking her fist at a pedestrian who walked into the street in front of her without acknowledging the car bearing down on him.

“As opposed to what?” Lara twisted water from her hair onto the Nissan’s floor, where it puddled on the rough carpet.

“To slim. There’s a difference. Are you soaking my new car on purpose?”

Amused guilt surged through Lara and she rubbed at the pool of water. “Not exactly. I was just trying to dry off a little. What’s the difference?”

Kelly eyed her. “You know I have to believe you when you say that, even though I wouldn’t believe anybody else, right?”

“It’s one of the perks of being friends with me.”

Kelly laughed out loud, sound filling the small vehicle. “I guess that’s true. Anyway, skinny doesn’t look good on anybody. Slim looks good on everybody. And you’re slim.” She glanced sideways at Lara and added, “David Kirwen thought slim looked good on you,” in a sly, hopeful tone.

“We have no dinner date, and even if we did, we wouldn’t.” A mis-tuned chord warbled through her own words. Lara said “Hush,” as much to herself as her friend, and tugged her seat belt on as Kelly plunged them into afternoon traffic.

The downpour had increased dramatically by the time they got back downtown. Wisdom said she should have Kelly drop her off at work, but she still had time on her extended lunch hour. Lara ducked out of Kelly’s car and ran for Saint Anthony’s Shrine, stopping beneath its arched entryway to wave as Kelly drove off. Then she slipped inside, bobbing toward the altar and crossing herself before scurrying down to a meeting room.

A dozen or so men and women were already there, gathered in a loose circle of chairs and listening intensely as a woman in her mid-thirties spoke. Lara offered a brief smile and took a seat, trying not to interrupt, but the speaker murmured, “Hi, Lara. Glad you made it,” before continuing. “It’s the credit cards, you know? They make it so easy. I only have one left, I cut the rest of them up—”

She broke off with a contrite look toward Lara, and one of the men—Matt—chuckled quietly. “Aw, hell, caught you out, huh? You know she don’t mean to.”

“I didn’t catch anyone out. Go on, Paula.”

“I’ve got one in the freezer,” Paula muttered. “In a big block of ice. For emergencies, Lara, I swear.”

“Hey.” Lara shook her head. “I’m not judging you. You should know that by now.”

“Not judging, just keepin’ us on the straight and narrow. You know, I’ve met a lot of head doctors in my time, but nobody’s as sharp as you, Lara. Donno how you do it.”

Lara brought a finger to her lips in a shush motion. “The floor is Paula’s right now, Matt. Let’s let her talk.”

She barely remembered the first time she’d been to a self-help meeting with her mother. It had only been a few months after her father’s death. Her hazy memories of him were of a man outrageously boisterous at times and inexplicably sullen at others. It wasn’t until she was ten or eleven that she’d really begun to understand that his moods had been exacerbated by alcohol, but in the aftermath of his death, her mother had started attending Al-Anon meetings. Lara, joining her, had found a certain relief in people trying so hard to tell the truth. They hadn’t always succeeded, but their presence at the meetings showed a kind of dedication to truth that she found almost nowhere else. Her own life hadn’t been badly set awry by substance abuse issues, but as a survivor, she’d been able to find a place in Alateen groups, and as an adult could hardly imagine her life without at least one weekly meeting.

“It’s for emergencies,” Paula was saying. “It’s been in there two months and I haven’t taken a hair dryer to it once. The other one has a really low limit.” The woman’s gaze came back to Lara. “I’ve got it all set up with the credit card company; I’m only allowed to make a payment once a month, so I can’t pay things off and pretend I’m not spending, which is what I used to do. And yesterday I saw this pair of earrings …”

She trailed off into waiting silence, then knotted her fingers together and frowned at them. “I know it doesn’t sound as bad as the alcohol or drug problems some of us have. I mean, it’s just shopping, right? It’s not like gambling. People think gambling is destructive, but shopping, everybody shops. Everybody’s got a credit card. And it’s not even like you can stop shopping if you want to, because you still always need food and sometimes you really do need clothes. Maybe not sixteen pairs of Jimmy Choos, but shoes, anyway,” she said to her lap, then looked up. “The woman behind the counter was really nice, too. She even let me try them on. They were these little moonstones with diamond drips. You would have liked them, Lara. They looked like something you’d wear.

“But I put them back.” Paula loosened her fingers and sat up straighter, color burnishing her cheeks to a warm dark brown. “I put them back, and I swear to God my hands were shaking and I almost cried when I was leaving the shop, but I put them back, and when I got outside it was like this one little tiny chain had broken and I felt so much better. That was three hundred dollars that was going to go into paying off a debt instead of making a new one. I don’t know, maybe it isn’t a lot, but to me it felt like everything.”

“Hey, babe, sometimes not a lot is everything.” Matt leaned forward to clap a big hand against Paula’s knee, then sat back again, folding his hands behind his head. “Three years, three months, twenty-six days, and …” He moved one arm to look at his watch, then said, “And seventeen hours drink-free,” before shooting Lara a sly glance.

She laughed as wrongness jangled over her skin. “I know the years and months are right, Matt. It must be the days or hours you’re fibbing about.”

“Fourteen hours.” He shook his head, grinning broadly. “Uncanny knack, uncanny knack. We gotta be the straightest, narrowest meeting in the city, with you keeping us on the line.”

“You keep yourselves on the line,” Lara disagreed. “I just drop by to make sure you’re doing all right. How’s it going?”

“Not too bad. You ever get a day when it’s not so much the booze you want as it’s boredom driving you to do something?” He raised his eyebrows and received a murmur of recognition from two or three of the others. “Sunday got bad enough I found myself another meeting to drop in to. Funny thing is I met a real nice girl there, and we went out to dinner after. I’m a cynic and I hate to say it, but maybe sometimes the Lord provides.”

Lara, smiling, listened a while longer, then slipped out again, hurrying through the rain back to work.

“And how is the suit for the button man?” Steve Taylor poked his head around Lara’s open office door, startling her and garnering an embarrassed smile.

“Mr. Mugabwi’s suit is coming along nicely. You’re not supposed to know I call him the button man.” Lara lifted one of the buttons in question, an antique ivory beauty with subtle age striations. “I can’t help it, though. I get a thrill every time I work with these.”