JW let out an ironic laugh. “I don’t have a home life per se. My wife and I are separated.” He was smiling as if it were funny, he realized, and a wave of regret washed over him. He felt his face flushing. “You know, I’m really not that comfortable sharing personal information like this.” He looked around the room, hoping to find a sympathetic smile. Instead, they all looked sorry for him. JW was deeply unsettled, but he clasped his hands and tried to stand in place politely.
“Did gambling ever affect your reputation?” the chair asked.
JW sighed in renewed irritation—with himself more than anything. “So I’ve been told.” It came out clipped. He felt the blood rising in his temples.
“Have you ever felt remorse after gambling?”
“Gary, just give him a minute,” said the woman beside JW.
JW shrugged. “Hasn’t everyone?” Now his sarcasm was unmistakeable.
“Look,” replied Gary, “you may think this is stupid, but this isn’t banking. Yes, I know who you are. We’re not your loan applicants. We’re gambling addicts, all of us, and wherever we come from, we’re all on the same level in here.”
JW felt a burst of anger. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize we’d been through the twenty questions yet.”
A few of the people laughed, and Gary glanced at them and banged his gavel. “That’s enough,” he said.
JW’s mouth was dry and his feet hurt. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just don’t think I’m ready for this.”
“You’re among friends. You can let it out.”
JW looked from the chair to the others in the room and back again. He let out a small laugh and rubbed his neck.
“No,” he said, “I’m not going to do that.” He realized he was clenching his fists, and willed them to relax. “I’m gonna go,” he said. “Thank you. I’m sorry.” He began moving toward the door.
“You don’t have to,” said Gary.
Too late, JW realized he’d left his Big Book on the chair. He grabbed another one from the table and hurried out.
“Addiction is cunning, baffling, and powerful,” he heard Gary call after him as he headed for the stairs. “It’s other people that keep us sane. You can come back any time!”
He took the stairs two at a time and pushed the door open, stepping out into the fresh air and sunshine. He was angry with himself for becoming combative and sarcastic. It was shameful, really, the way he had conducted himself. Maybe there were things he could have picked up by sitting in the back of a meeting like that.
The gravel was littered with cigarette butts and withered dandelions. There were polished flecks of green glass from an old Mountain Dew bottle mixed in with the rocks near his car. He got in and closed the door. He inhaled the sweltering air. Turned the key and let the air conditioner blast dust at him. Then he pulled back out onto the highway and headed toward town.
Some ten minutes later, JW pulled up and parked in front of his house, still jangled and full of self-recrimination. It was shortly after noon. He wanted to catch Carol, and he knew that she usually tried to eat lunch at home, where she could listen to the midday program on public radio. He got out, walked up to the house, and rang the glowing round doorbell. He waited a moment. Maybe he should have stayed in that meeting. He felt as if he had made a choice between two paths without realizing it, but he also knew that he was being overly dramatic. He could always go back, as Gary had said. Any time. He rang the doorbell again. He heard the sound of a squeaking floorboard just inside, and then the door was unlocked and swung inward.
“John!” Carol smiled nervously at him. Her face was flushed and she seemed pleasantly surprised and a bit out of breath. She stepped out, pulling the door partially shut behind her. Her shoulder-length blonde hair fell in loose shaggy locks around her face. He recognized a cubic zirconium necklace around her neck, just like the one he had seen on the Home Shopping Network. It struck him as odd that she would buy something like that for herself, especially now. Still, seeing her somehow made him feel relieved and normal again.
“Hey,” he said.
“You look awful.” She smiled quizzically and pushed a lock from her face.
“I tried calling, a number of times.”
She frowned and smiled at the same time, a mixed expression that he had always found endearing in its impenetrability. “John, you stood me up. I waited up ’til after eleven.”
“I know, I’m sorry. You got time for lunch?”
“No, I don’t, I have a meeting today.”
“A meeting?”
“Yeah, I told you. Jim Franklin’s taking me to the new agents luncheon.”
He nodded. She had said that. Then he heard the squeaky floorboard inside. A flicker of insecurity darted across Carol’s face, and in that instant the mirage of old times evaporated. She moved partway back through the door. Behind her in the foyer stood Jim Franklin, a blow-dried insurance agent in his early forties, whom JW had always disliked. Carol’s thin brows knit together and she looked down, moving the hair back behind her ear.
“John!” Franklin said in a glad-handing tone as he shrugged into his suitcoat behind her. “How was the conference?”
JW wanted to believe that it was all a big mistake. That Jim Franklin wasn’t really there, in his house, in the middle of the day, with Carol, who had been slow to answer the door. Jim Franklin, who knew about his travel schedule.
“I’m fine, Jim,” he managed to get out. He turned back to Carol. “Is Julie home?”
“You know she’s at school.” But her voice had a little break in it as she realized why he had asked. The sky seemed to tilt in her eyes.
“It’s not what you think,” she said. “We have to run. We can talk later.” She and Jim stepped outside. She pulled the door shut and locked it as Jim gave JW a little wave and a winking nod and headed toward his sports car, which was partially obscured by the evergreens at the corner of the house.
He nodded to Carol. “Call my cell.”
“Okay.”
He watched her hurry after Jim, and then the car pulled out. They both waved. He waved back. It was a fine day, and anyone watching would have thought the waves festive, the beginning of something fun.
JW walked to his car across the street, the sky beating down on him with the light of a desert. His hands were numb despite the heat, as if his arteries had been cut at the armpits. In the brilliant sunshine he could really see how filthy his car was, and that there was a rust speck forming on the lower portion of his door. He’d have to wash it, but the rust would be harder to fix.
He got in and set out for the Northland Mall. He gripped the wheel tightly. It couldn’t be. It was too fast. They’d only been separated for a few months. And after all, she had said it wasn’t what it looked like. He thought about their daughter Julie. In all this, it was time with her he most looked forward to, but they hadn’t had much of it lately. In some ways Julie had more in common with him than she did with Carol. She was interested in things, in nature, in animals, in science. While Carol was practical and family-oriented and tradition-bound, Julie was an impractical dreamer. He loved that about her, and he had always encouraged it.
Beyond their birthday excursions and camping trips with the Brownies, Julie and JW talked about science and the universe on trips to the grocery store, or to the Northland Mall. On one of their trips together, driving to visit his father as he was dying of cirrhosis in the hospital in Fargo, Julie read a book on evolution—which JW had bought her secretly, since Carol didn’t want her reading books that openly defied the pastor’s sermons. He watched the light reflect in her glasses as she read to him about the geological