Page 42 of Where Happiness Begins

And I wanted to drink. I wanted to drink so fucking bad it physically hurt. I kept thinking about that bottle of gin still hidden under my kitchen sink, and I could picture draining it so easily. I craved the burning in my throat, the haziness that would get over me almost instantaneously. The only thing that kept me from doing it was the idea thatthiswas all I had. My sobriety. I’d left everything for it. How sad would it be if I didn’t even have that?

Still, I shouldn’t have come tonight. I’m too on edge. I can see this when I sit in front of Frank and realize my hands are still shaking.

He briefly looks up from his crosswords. “Hey, Carter.” Then he does a double take. “Everything okay?”

I don’t answer. If I say something, I have a feeling it’ll all come out like a nuclear bomb touching ground and hitting everything it can reach, and he doesn’t deserve that. Logically, I can see this.

But when he asks again, “What’s wrong?” I can’t help it.

“Everything, Frank. Every. Fucking. Thing.” I drag a hand through my hair that’s in dire need of a trim, strands falling over my brows. “There’s no point anymore, so I won’t talk to you about weather or a fucking cookie recipe. I’m done.”

I expect him to explode back, the way my own father does. I start a reaction in chain, a kindle that eventually becomes a forest fire. I give it bad, he gives it worse. Of course, that was back when he still talked to me. My brother might have yelled at me with expletives and insults when I left, but at least he cared enough to say something. My parents didn’t even bother with a call or a text. I’d failed—worse, quit—at the one thing they’d ever expected from me, so what was left after that?

However, Frank does the opposite of that. Instead, he closes his book, leans forward, and says, “No point in what, Carter?”

So that’s the part he stuck on.

“In everything,” I say, maybe sounding dramatic, but I don’t know how else you could see my situation. I have no family, no friends, no career, no prospect for the future, not even the hobby I used to love. I have money from the royalties we made, but what worth is that when I’ve got no one to share it with?

I have nothing.

“You seem angry,” he says in that annoying, calm voice of his.

“No shit.”

“Who are you angry at?”

The muscles in my jaw tighten so much, pain rises to my forehead and then to my scalp. My hands bunch, my feet push against the floor, and my shoulders squeeze up to my ears. The tension has to release one way or another.

“The entire world,” I say, loud enough that a couple a table over looks up at me. I ignore them, focusing on the way Frank’s stare holds mine as if he wants me to stay, to keep on talking. I realize just then I’ve fallen right into his trap, but I can’t make it out. Not anymore. He wants me to talk? Fine. I’ll talk. “I’m angry at everyone who’s ever crossed my path. I’m angry at the people who offered me drinks when I was already trashed. I’m angry at the girls who climbed me during parties when I was too drunk to even realize what was going on. I’m angry at my parents for not preparing me better for what was to come.”

He looks at me so long, not even blinking away at the awkwardness of the held eye contact, that I let myself say the most accurate part of my answer, in a voice that’s barely a whisper now. “I’m angry at myself.”

I’m the one who decided to join the band. I’m the one who never said no when I was offered a drink. I’m the one who lost control so much that I had to break the one thing my only brother had ever wanted. I’m the one who ruined all the relationships around me.

I’m the problem.

And when Frank nods along, with his preppy sweater and his square glasses, looking like the most squeaky-clean human youcould come across, I spit out, “Don’t act like you know the feeling.”

He stops moving. His body remains still for so long, I think I might’ve broken him. Then his lips quirk up.

Strangest man I’ve ever met.

“You think I’ve never been angry at myself?”

To be fair, I don’t know that. Ican’tknow that, mostly because I’ve never allowed him to actually start a conversation for us to get to know each other. I didn’t want him to know me, and I didn’t particularly want to know him either.

But now he’s got me wondering. He’s in AA. He used to have an alcohol problem. The probability of everything not being as it seems is high.

“Son, you don’t know how many days I’ve spent hating myself.” He shakes his head, still smiling, but this time, it looks sad. “Every time I hid in the pantry to gulp down vodka I’d hidden in vinegar bottles while my daughter was playing Barbie in the living room next door, I wanted to die. I really, really did. Her mother had left me, and I couldn’t cope, and I let myself drown while I still had my daughter to care for. She saved me from it, that’s for sure, but even still, I’m so angry at myself for all the times I failed her, even if she never noticed.”

I swallow.

“Being angry is part of the recovery. You’ll never be more angry with anyone than you will be with yourself. It’s the sad truth of it. But you wanna know something?”

I feel like a kid watching television, entranced by the shiny new toy being shown off, unable to blink away. I don’t answer, but he must see how he’s got me in the palm of his hand.

“It gets better. At some point, the anger dulls, and you learn to forgive yourself.” He twists his coffee cup in a clockwise motion, over and over again. “It never truly goes away, but eventually, you see that some of the things you said and did were part of the disease, and you decide to move on from them.”

---