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was talking to her this morning about Terry, in fact. She’s trying to help me figure out what happened.”
    There was a long beat of silence before MP spoke. “Do you know what she did last week?”
    “Something awful?”
    “She came to the Saturday-afternoon women’s meeting at Saint Ann’s, and when it was her turn to share, she made amends—in front of everyone—to Sherry. She wanted to apologize for sleeping with Jack the week before. She said she felt really bad about hurting another sober woman. ‘A sister’ is what she called her.”
    I thought about this while I swung my truck around on the cloverleaf between the Santa Ana Freeway and the Newport Freeway. A low-wattage energy-saving lightbulb appeared above my head. “Sherry hadn’t known about it until that moment?”
    “That’s correct.”
    “Aren’t you supposed to keep that stuff to yourself?” I said. “I mean, it being a closed meeting and all?”
    “Sherry’s going to divorce Jack,” MP said. “If it were me, I would have cut off his balls.”
    Apparently, advanced yoga training was more ethically complicated than I had imagined. Maybe I shouldn’t have laughed. MP hung up.
    When I clicked back over to Claire, she said, “I think you’ve got some bad ideas about me, Randy. Was that MP on the other line?”
    Why, besides causing trouble, would Claire call my home when she already had my cell number?
    “Is it possible,” I said, “to have
good
ideas about you?”
    “This is what I’m talking about,” Claire said. “What you just said.”
    “Tell me something,” I said. “Have you made any 911 calls in Spanish lately?”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but if it has something to do with Terry’s death, I was out of his life a long time before any of that shit went down. You know that better than anyone. You know exactly when I broke things off.”
    “Thanks for calling, Claire. Take it easy.” I started to hang up.
    “I was trying to apologize for being an asshole,” she shouted. “Can you just—”
    “Okay.” Calling yourself an asshole was always good for another minute of my time.
    “I shouldn’t have brought MP into our conversation this morning.”
    It sounded like an authentic apology. “I’m sorry, too, Claire. I like you. You’re trouble, but I like you.”
    It took her a moment to fill the silence that followed my admission. “I like you, too, Randy.”
    Claire hung up. She didn’t ask for anything. She didn’t feed me another line about an electrician named after a dog. She didn’t try to hurt me. Either this was a new strategy to destroy men’s lives or she’d actually apologized. When she started coming to meetings a few years ago, there had been a moment whenshe got it—she knew why she was there—but that moment passed, and she became the kind of A.A. you needed to watch out for: someone who will take you down quicker than you can lift her up. Claire still had volunteers, though. For one short, bad moment a couple of years before he died, Terry had been one of them.

    Every alcoholic has one thing that cuts to the marrow. The thing that he wants but can’t quite achieve, the thing that he’s always on the cusp of, the “until I get this, I am nothing.” For some of us, it’s professional success. For some, it’s a good marriage. For Terry, it was children.
    Terry wanted kids more than anything.
    His own father had been an Irish Catholic bank president with eight kids. Terry could no way ever hope to become a bank president—he’d been arrested for everything from a teenage armed robbery to kiting checks right before he got sober, and the fact that he’d been able to join the bar was an A.A. miracle—but he always believed he should have kids. He just never found the right mother.
    That deal with Claire Monaco, his attempt to extort her son from her, was at the extreme end of a long line of attempts to put together a relationship that would produce kids. His choices