Read Online Sorrow Road by Julia Keller - Free Book Online Page B

her way past her convictions about alcoholics, with which she’d had, to her displeasure, far too much experience.
    Time for a break. She stomped her booted feet. She stabbed the business end of the shovel into a nearby mound of snow. It stayed upright without a fuss. She slapped her gloved hands against the sides of her black down jacket, encouraging her circulation to work a little faster. She opened her mouth and took a deep breath. The cold air was instantly painful, a pain that reached deep into her chest. Yes, she should have been expecting it, but for some reason, she wasn’t; it took her a few seconds to recover. She blinked back the water that sprang into her eyes. Then she dislodged the shovel and got back to work. Back to her thinking.
    The second kind? The second kind were the subtle drunks.
    They were the sly, hidden ones, the ones who were convinced of their own cleverness when they refused a glass of wine at a social occasion, making a great noble show of sliding a hand over the top of the glass when the waiter came by— Oh, no thanks, none for me! —and then later, in the privacy of their own homes, finishing off a fifth of Jack straight from the bottle and getting stinking, puking, shit-faced drunk. They awoke hours later to a battering-ram headache and upended chairs and shattered glassware and a large lurking pocket of nothingness where the memory of the night before ought to have been.
    Darlene Strayer had been the second kind. No doubt about it. Because Bell had never had the slightest inkling of a problem. There were no hints, no rumors. Yet the evidence seemed pretty clear. The sobriety chip, for one thing. And for another, nobody drove drunk on a winter-slick mountain road except somebody who could not help it, somebody who had given up command and control over herself a long time ago when it came to drinking.
    Between the two kinds of drunks, Bell preferred the first. Public drunks made no bones about who they were. You knew what you were dealing with. The second kind—the sneaks—were far more challenging. She’d had a friend in high school, Mindy Brewer, whose mother was the second kind. Linda Brewer showed the world a smiling, cheerful face, and was fond of reciting homilies about self-reliance and facing up to your problems and the sacred gift of each new day, but in private—Mindy confessed this to Bell one night when they were seniors, as they sat in Mindy’s silver Mustang after clocking out from the Hardee’s—Linda Brewer drank vast quantities of vodka every night, and ended up in a sloppy rage. They were all her mother’s co-conspirators, Mindy said, herself included. Everyone kept the secret: her dad, her little brother Arthur, and her mother’s sister Paige, who came over sometimes to help when Linda could not get out of bed because she had “the flu.”
    Yeah, Mindy said. The flu. Like that fooled anybody.
    The first kind of drunk was a nuisance, and they annoyed you. The second kind broke your heart, over and over again.
    And over and over again after that.
    With each accumulating thought, Bell thrust the shovel forward, hooking it up underneath a too-big hunk of snow, bending over to lend an extra oomph to her maneuvers. As she straightened up, the shovel came up with her, along with its fresh burden of snow. She grunted. She turned, dumping the load next to the sidewalk. At first she’d tried tossing it, but the snow was too heavy, and she ended up just letting it slide off the side. Then she inched forward and did it again: bend, thrust, hook, lift, grunt, dump. Repeat.
    Years ago, when she lived in D.C. with Sam and Carla, they had hired a landscaping service to keep the walks and the driveway clear after heavy snowfalls. And the few times since her return here that a major storm had come barreling in, Bell paid a kid in the neighborhood, Ben Fawcett, to handle the aftermath. Trouble was, Ben was away this weekend on a ski