Chapter One
Ian
I called it the Itch. That feeling when my hands and brain practically vibrated in time with each other to try something new.
Learn guitar.
Make perfect crepes.
Ride a horse.
Take up blacksmithing.
Back in my drinking days, the Itch almost always involved alcohol, and when I was especially unlucky, a night in the drunk tank or a trip to the emergency room for some stitches or a cast. The worst days and nights ended with my parents begging me to go to rehab. Church. Therapy. Anything to get my drinking under control.
“I’m not an alcoholic,” I’d say, waving a dismissive hand when my mother drove me home from the emergency room with my leg in a cast or a line of brackish stitches that almost—but not quite—blended into my hairline. “I just like to have a few drinks sometimes.”
And that had been true—in college, maybe, when I wrote it off as being a party animal, but by senior year, I couldn’t touch alcohol without drinking myself into a state of sloppy, undignified intoxication. A behavioral pattern that worsened in the years that followed, until I wrapped my car around a tree at age twenty-nine. And with six pins in my ankle and a murderous headache, I looked my tearful parents in the eye from my hospital bed and told them what we all knew.
That I was an alcoholic, and that it was time to dry out.
When I hobbled into my first Alcoholic Anonymous meeting a few days later, cursing at my crutches and twitching for want of a drink, Edith spotted me across the room, plopped down next to me, and told me that I didn’t need to be embarrassed.
That it was time to share. To learn. To grow.
It had been three years, and I’d done all of those things. Was still doing those things. I learned that when the Itch grew, I should listen to it instead of drowning it out with the burn of whiskey. To follow the recovery maxim—accept the things I cannot change.
For me, that meant accepting myself. I was a thirty-two-year-old man with a raging case of ADHD, a guy who couldn’t help getting into a heap of trouble unless I fed that hunger to learn. To try. To do. And that hunger—well, it wasn’t bad, I decided. Not at all. It just was, and if some people thought I was a little too intense, then I would accept that as well.
Some people even liked that about me. Now that I knew myself—really knew myself, as a sober guy—I liked it, too.
Today, the Itch zoomed in on, of all things, my sponsor’s hands from across our table at the diner, where two knitting needles clacked together and a rectangle of neatly interlocked yarn was just starting to form.
“That’s amazing,” I murmured as I hunched down in my seat to watch the needles in Edith’s liver-spotted hands fly. “Where’d you learn to do that?”
I looked up at Edith just in time to watch her eyes roll behind her rhinestone-studded reading glasses. “Learned when I was a kid. I just do it when I’m in the mood these days. Why, you interested?”
Straightening, I reached out and dumped some sugar into my coffee, stirring before I took a big swig. “It looks cool. Do you think you could teach me?”
I liked to get right to the point with Edith—she didn’t tolerate hemming and hawing very well. It was one of the things I loved about her—no sweet-talking required with her, it was either going to be a yes or a no.
She snorted. “No. I’m your sponsor, not your goddamn sensei. And anyway, look at this.” She held up the needles, showing the scant few rows already stitched. “I can barely remember how to do it anymore. You want to learn, go take a class.”
I smiled and shook my head. “Sometimes I wonder if you even like me, Edith.”
She frowned down into her knitting. “It’s your gorgeous face. And your tight ass.” She paused and thought for a moment. “And the way you looked when you gimped into your first meeting, like a big idiot baby. I thought that was kind of cute.”
I barked out a laugh, drawing the stares of several nearby diner patrons, as well as Edith’s patented raised eyebrow.
“Idiot baby,” I repeated as I toyed with my coffee cup. “My father would love that one.”
Edith shrugged as she sipped her own cup. “It’s true. You were—what, three days without a drink? And you looked like hell.”
“I felt like hell.”
I thought back to those first few weeks of my sobriety, when the urge to drink beat down the doors of my brain, and my emotions, my senses—everything—overwhelmed me so much that I wanted to lock myself in a dark room with a fifth of whiskey and not come out until things made sense again.
My brother George lived with me for months, rolling out of bed or dropping what he was doing without complaint every time I told him that I needed someone to sit with me. To talk to me. Anything to keep me from walking out the door and going to the nearest bar. To keep me from losing my hard-won sanity in the bottom of a shot glass.