‘It’s complex, Mum. He cut me off from all of you and he was so persuasive.’ She couldn’t say Calum’s name. Didn’t think she ever could again. ‘It’s not your fault, Mum. Please understand that.’
Now, a month after the wedding, Meg was driving Stu to the addiction centre, a residential facility where he would spend twenty-eight days working on his alcohol and gambling addictions. He had never done residential rehab before. And Stu agreeing to it was the only reason Meg had married him, a fact that still made Eden wince.
‘Mum,’ she’d said several times in her father’s presence, ‘I’ll never be sure if this remarriage was a good idea.’
‘Eden, you can be an awful cow, you know that,’ Stu would say. ‘I’m not drinking.’
Eden would look over at him. ‘Well done, you. Let’s have an award over here – Stu Robicheaux, for not drinking.’
‘Darling, I just wish you’d support us,’ Meg said.
‘I do support you, Mum,’ Eden said, ‘I’m just not sure about Pops. I don’t know if he has it in him.’
‘That’s a terrible thing to say,’ Stu had said.
‘I’m just telling the truth,’ said Eden, ‘that’s what I do, tell the truth, no matter how tricky.’
‘Your form of truth-telling is very vicious,’ said her father grimly.
Today, Meg was driving down to Wexford to deliver Stu to the SAOR rehab centre. It had taken this long to get him in. Clearly the country was full of people who needed alcohol and gambling rehab.
‘See,’ said Stu in one of his lighter moments, ‘there’re loads of us out there.’
‘I didn’t marry the rest of them,’ said Meg, ‘I married you, I want you to get better.’
‘Course I’ll get better,’ he said.
There was another forty-five minutes on the road at least.
Meg decided she needed a coffee. If she had to sit in silence, she needed caffeine. There was a service area a few kilometres away and when it appeared, she drove in, parked the car, put petrol in it, then poked her head back in the door.
‘Are you coming?’
‘What?’ said Stu, still lost in space.
‘Are you coming in, because I have to pay and I’m going to get a cup of coffee.’
‘Ah, I don’t know.’
‘Come on in,’ she commanded.
He got out of the car and followed her in.
‘I’ll pay and you can get me coffee,’ she said. ‘I’ll have an almond flat white.’
‘I remember when everyone just had an ordinary coffee,’ muttered Stu.
She went to pay for the petrol, wondering if she’d have to go to jail if she kicked him out of the car when exiting the service area. What would she say to the judge?
‘I was bringing him to rehab and he annoyed me so much that I thought I’d just push him out the door, Your Honour. All it took was a little kick. He was annoying. There rests the case for the defence.’
A slightly hysterical giggle escaped her. Was she mad to have married Stu, knowing everything that she did? There were a couple of people in front of her in the queue and she turned around to see her husband at the coffee counter. He was carefully stirring sugars into one of the coffees. Not his, she knew, because he didn’t take sugar, but into hers. He did it so gently that she felt a wave of tenderness rise up in her to meet his. She loved him. And if there was any chance she could help him get better, she would. For all that Indy said, rightly, that Meg could not make him get better.
‘It’s up to him, Mum.’
Back in the car, she took the chocolate bar she’d bought, broke it in two and gave half to him.
‘You’re going to need this,’ she said, ‘sugar. Apparently, people need lots of sugar when they give up alcohol.’
