“They’ll understand, y’know,” I tell him. “It might be a little weird or awkward, but they can handle it.”
“I’m not sureIcan,” he says. “This online dating stuff? It’s freakin’ nuts. It’s not for me. If I ever do it, it’s gonna be the old-fashioned way.”
“A handsome, successful guy like you? I think you’ll be fine.”
“Not so sure about either of those things.”
I catch on that, take a swallow of wine. The Tremont family started a chain of microbreweries that did quite well. Adam, the only child, took over the business, more or less, about a decade ago, and things ran smoothly until the last few years, when COVID-19 hit and struck a massive blow to the business.
“The restaurant side is just now coming back,” he says. “Good thing for us we had the retail sales. One thing people didn’t stop doing during the pandemic was drink alcohol.”
“Money’s still tight?” I ask, as if I’m only moving along the conversation and not probing.
“Pretty tight, yeah. We closed another brewery last week.”
“I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.”
He lets out a bitter chuckle. “If Monica were here, she’d be telling me to look forward, not back.”
Yep, that sounds like her. I’m glad he remembers her that way, because that was the Monica he met in college, the Monica with whom he fell in love, the Monica who was the mother to his children. Not the Monica who injured her back and started on OxyContin, who didn’t realize when she crossed that line from needing oxy for the pain to just needing oxy, period, who eventually did the unthinkable—unthinkable for Monica, at least—and walked away from her family for a man who was more than happy to keep supplying her with pain-killing opioids.
I, of all people, was Monica’s confidante, to the extent she let any of usknow that she was falling into the grips of that poison, that it was slowly predominating over everything else in her life. Maybe it was because I’d been such a fuckup myself, the black sheep of the family, that she felt more comfortable sharing with me than Adam. I was three hundred miles away, so it was mostly by phone. I didn’t realize how warped her reality had become because I wasn’t there in person.
Or that’s what I try to tell myself, at least. I was the younger, screwup sister, talking and texting with her from a distance. She was the belle of our high school, the prom queen who went to college and married a handsome, wealthy guy and had two beautiful children. How seriously could she take advice from the high school dropout who’d never made a good decision in her life?
But I knew she was faltering. I could tell those drugs were messing with her judgment. I knew she needed someone to shake some sense into her.
Did Ireallyhelp as much as I could have? Or was there a part of me that drew some satisfaction from seeing Ms. Perfect stumble from her perch?
“Do you need money, Adam?” I ask, point-blank.
“Why, you offering?” That’s just like him to deflect, to joke. “We’ll get through this,” he says. “It’ll be tight for a while. Might have to whittle down the number of breweries some more. Girls, it’s getting cold! Let’s wrap up the game!”
Macy howls in protest, as her older sister seems to be getting the better of her, and she doesn’t want to be on the losing end of the final score. She says, “Just a little longer,” which Adam probably already factored in. With these girls, everything is a negotiation, every command merely an opening bid.
And he changed the subject, I note.
He exhales a heavy sigh. “Amazing how life can turn,” he says. “One minute, you think you’ve got it all figured out, all planned and secure, and then...” He snaps his fingers. “And then everything you believed in, every assumption you had made—poof.”
“Yeah.”
“And we—we were just getting over Monica,” he says. “That year of torture when she left, when I tried to explain to the girls that Mommy left because of the drugs, not because of them, and then she OD’d, and any hope we had that she might come back...”
“I know.”
“And we’re finally crawling out from under that—y’know, two of the most brutal years of our lives—and COVID hits. My breweries tank, I have half of what I used to have and will probably lose more...”
I grab his arm. “They might hear you.”
He looks at the girls, who aren’t paying attention, scrambling for a loose basketball on the driveway court.
“Jesus, I’m sorry.” He chuckles. “I promise, most of the time, I’m okay. Just sometimes, especially if I’ve had a couple of these,” he says, raising his glass of wine. “Sometimes it all comes tidal-waving back.”
“You have every right to all of those feelings. You’ll be okay.”
He smiles at me. “Look forward, right?”
Exactly. Just like Monica used to say. Look forward, not back.