Page 58 of Where Happiness Begins

“Lilianne, for the love of God,” he chastises but still doesn’t pull it off.

“Just one more second, please,” I say before looking up at him and bursting out in another fit of laughter. When I found the boater hat at the bottom of Dad’s walk-in closet, I immediately put it on Carter’s head before he could say no, and the image was too good to be true.

“I’m giving you two more seconds and then I’m done.”

I don’t waste the opportunity, grabbing my phone at the speed of light and snapping a picture of him, stone face and all, with the hat flattening all his hair. There. Now I can laugh about it forever.

“You’re impossible,” he says as he finally takes the hat off. He’d already kept it on far longer than anticipated.

Cleaning up this room has been an interesting experience, that’s for sure. At times, I found items I had fond memories of or thingsI’d been looking for—Nan’s necklacewashere, after all, under a pile of papers on his desk—and at other times, I fell upon stuff I’d forgotten he owned, and the thought that some of my memories of him were already slipping away almost brought me to my knees multiple times.

All in all, though, it was survivable, and I only have the big man in front of me to thank for that. It’s as if he can sense my mood and know when I need silence or when I need a breather. Observant as always. Something I don’t think he even recognizes in himself.

“Okay, back to business.” I return inside the closet. We’ve emptied most of the room in the past three hours, from bedding to clothes we could donate and the few things I decided to keep, and now we’re stuck with the little knickknacks. Most of them are useless, but I’d feel terrible throwing them away.

There are a few boxes of things at the bottom of the closet we still need to sort through, so I go to grab one but find it stolen from my hands at the last second.

“I can carry my own boxes.”

“I know,” Carter says, still bringing it all the way to the bare mattress.

“Thank you,” I grumble as I get to it, then start triaging. Thick biographies that go straight to thedonatepile. A sweater from our trip to Ogunquit I decide to keep. Random paper documents I’ll go through later.

Then my hand lands on a booklet, and I freeze when I pull it out of the box.

An Alcoholics Anonymous flyer.

I blink, turning it over in my hands as if I’ll find some kind of information about why Dad had this in his stuff. Maybe some kind of message he’d scribbled behind a flyer while talking on the phone.

Nothing.

Frowning, I put it down, then return to the box, only to be met with more of the same.

A Member’s-Eye View of Alcoholics Anonymous

A.A. At A Glance

Living Sober

My fingers trace the title of the last flyer. My father never drank in excess. In fact, I don’t remember when the last time I saw him drink alcohol was.

I shake my head as I continue going through file after file on dealing with alcoholism, getting a sponsor, and even becoming a sponsor.

“What’s all this?” Carter asks from the other side of the room.

I open my mouth to answer, but no word seems to come out. I look up at him, probably resembling a fish out of water.

My silence seems to trigger something in him because immediately, he’s in front of me, picking up one flyer, then another. His throat bobs.

“He wasn’t an alcoholic,” I tell Carter, not because it’d have been shameful if he was, but because he couldn’t have been, simple as that.

“Lilianne…” He takes a step closer, pity clouding his eyes.

“He wasn’t.” I pull out even more documents and books from the box as if wanting it to finally be empty. If it’s all out, then Ican’t be surprised by anything else, so I grab and grab. My hands are shaking as I throw them with the others. “I knew my father. He wasn’t an alcoholic.”

He repeats my name, this time with a softness that brings tears to my eyes like he’s seeing something I’m not. Then his hands land gently on mine, stopping me in my movements.

“Knowing someone doesn’t mean they can’t have struggles you don’t know about.”

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