“I thought you had quit drinking. Wasn’t losing your job and the public humiliation of a demotion enough for you? What else has to happen before you recognize that you have a problem?”
“No, hold on,” he ordered. “Yes, I did stop drinking after my, uh, public humiliation. But I don’t think I had a problem with alcohol.”
They never did.
“Really,” he continued earnestly. “I stopped because I didn’t ever want to act like that again, but it wasn’t normal behavior for me. Not since college,” he added. “I haven’t been getting drunk all the time and I wasn’t even drinking every day. I wasn’t trying to hide it, I wasn’t…” He paused. “What else do alcoholics do?”
“They hurt their families,” I said.
“I wasn’t hurting anyone, I swear. I overdid it before your class showed up for the field trip because my wife—my ex-wife sent me pictures of herself with someone else and I also got served with divorce papers.”
I had questions. “Why did she want to end things with you?”
He guessed what I was hinting at. “It wasn’t because I had a problem with alcohol,” he promised. “Eris and I had beenfighting a lot. We probably shouldn’t have gotten married to begin with and the distance, with me living up here, didn’t help. I knew there were problems and I was doubting that we were going to last, but seeing that stuff was awful.”
“Were they naked pictures?”
The expression he got said yes, but he discussed something else. “In the divorce papers, she accused me of all kinds of shit, like that I was abusive and cruel, that I was an addict, you name it. I couldn’t believe that someone I’d thought that I loved would lie about me that way.”
I hoped that everything his wife had said really was a lie and everything he was saying now was true.
“I went to that bar tonight because I was looking for you,” Everett continued. “You had texted me about the janitor sleeping through his shift instead of cleaning and I thought we could talk about it, but you weren’t there and a woman wearing a Dixie Cup like a Navy seaman sent me over here instead.”
That had been Jannie, and the white sailor hat was one of her favorites.
“Thanks for letting me know about the dirty bathrooms and the bugs at your school. What else is going on?”
“That was in the middle school, and our janitor is great,” I corrected. “I don’t have anything else to tell you. I’m sorry you came here.”
“You are?”
“Because I don’t have any additional information,” I explained.
“Oh. I was asking what was going on with you. You have a new job,” he said, looking around the lobby.
“And my sister and I made other changes, too. The good news is, we don’t have to worry about the water being shut off.”
“That was going to happen? The last thing I heard from you was that your mother had moved out of your house.”
“She did,” I said, and yawned. “We were actually having several issues but a lot of them have been resolved.” I glanced at the security camera, sorry now about the yawn and thinking that the owner probably wouldn’t like it if I had friends visiting, either. Not that Everett was a friend—why was he here? “Could you stand a few feet back? And also, could you explain why you came to this motel if you don’t want a room?”
“Is that a personal space issue?” he asked. He did move away, out of the range of the lens. “I came because…I had the time, I guess. You texted about the janitor and I started thinking about the last time we’d talked, when you said that your mom left you guys. Did she come back?”
I tilted my body so that the camera couldn’t spot that I was talking, and therefore I wouldn’t appear to be carrying on a conversation with myself. “No, and I haven’t heard from her. I think she really did block me, or at least, she doesn’t mind ignoring my messages and calls. I hope she’s all right. The last time this happened, it wasn’t anything good.”
“She took off before?”
“No, my dad did,” I said. “My mom had stuck around until recently.” That reminded me of Everett’s own issues with running out on children. “How is your custody fight going?”
“Not great.” He stepped to the side and accidentally triggered the doors, which opened and let snow blow in. He waited until they slid shut before he spoke again. “As a stepfather in a short-lived marriage, I don’t have much standing. My wife—my soon-to-be-ex-wife—and her attorney claim that I’m trying to hold on to the relationship and make things difficult, like I’m using her son to extend the divorce and somehow get out of paying alimony.”
“But you’re not?”
“No. No, I’m not, definitely not. Not at all.”
He sounded just like my sister when I asked her if she was using fake accounts to track her ex-boyfriend, Boyd, because she still cared about him. No, she told me. No, don’t be stupid, Zoey! No, no chance, absolutely no way. I’m not looking, because I don’t care at all, none.
I didn’t believe either of them. Willow had been acting furtive lately, tilting her phone so that I couldn’t see her screen and once I’d woken up to her having a late-night, whispered conversation in the bathroom. I hadn’t ever been married like Everett or in a serious relationship like my sister’s, but even I could understand that it was a losing proposition to try to hold on to a person who wanted to get away from you. It wasn’t ever going to work.
