Mr. Franklin was wearing a suit and tie. He had a sharp haircut. Dad—unshaven, shirt untucked, barefoot—introduced us. Mr. Franklin shook my hand, said it was very nice to meet me, then asked if I minded going outside so he could speak to my father alone. I went willingly enough, but the windows were still open from the breakfast disaster and I heard quite a bit of what Mr. Franklin said. I remember two things especially. Dad said the drinking was because he still missed Janey so much. And Mr. Franklin said, “If booze would bring her back, I’d say fine. But it won’t, and how would she feel if she saw how you and your boy are living now?”
The other thing he said was, “Aren’t you sick and tired of being sick and tired?” That was when my father started to cry. Usually I hated it when he did that （weak, weak）， but I thought maybe this crying was different.
8
You knew all that was coming, and probably you know the rest of the story as well. I’m sure you do if you’re in recovery yourself or know someone who is. Lindy Franklin took Dad to an AA meeting that night. When they got back, Mr. Franklin called his wife and said he was staying over with a friend. He slept on our pull-out couch and the next morning he took Dad to a seven AM meeting called Sober Sunrise. That became Dad’s regular meeting and it was where he got his first-year AA medallion. I skipped school so I could give it to him, and that time I was the one who did some blubbing. No one seemed to mind; there’s a lot of blubbing at those meetings. Dad gave me a hug afterward, and so did Lindy. By then I was calling him by his first name, because he was around a lot. He was my dad’s sponsor in the program.
That was the miracle. I know a lot about AA now, and know it happens to men and women all over the world, but it still seemed like a miracle to me. Dad didn’t get his first medallion exactly a year after Lindy’s Twelfth Step call, because he had a couple of slips, but he owned up to them and the AA people said what they always say, keep coming back, and he did, and the last slip—a single beer from a sixpack he poured down the sink—was just before Halloween of 2009. When Lindy spoke at Dad’s first anniversary, he said that lots of people get offered the program but never get the program. He said Dad was one of the lucky ones. Maybe that was true, maybe my prayer was just a coincidence, but I chose to believe it wasn’t. In AA, you can choose to believe what you want. It’s in what recovering alkies call the Big Book.
And I had a promise to keep.
9
The only meetings I went to were Dad’s anniversary meetings, but as I say, Lindy was around a lot and I picked up most of the slogans AA people are always spouting. I liked you can’t turn a pickle back into a cucumber, and God don’t make junk, but the one that stuck with me—and does to this day—is something I heard Lindy tell Dad one night when Dad was talking about all the unpaid bills and how he was afraid of losing the house. Lindy said my father getting sober was a miracle. Then he added, “But miracles ain’t magic.”
Six months after sobering up, Dad reapplied at Overland, and with Lindy Franklin and some others backing him up—including his old boss, the one who pink-slipped him—he got his job back, but he was on probation and knew it. That made him work twice as hard. Then, in the fall of 2011 （two years sober）， he had a discussion with Lindy that lasted so long that Lindy ended up sleeping on the pull-out couch again. Dad said he wanted to go independent, but he wouldn’t do it without Lindy’s blessing. After making sure that Dad wouldn’t start drinking again if his new business failed—as sure as he could be, anyway; recovery ain’t rocket science, either—Lindy told him to go ahead and take a shot.
Dad sat me down and explained what that meant: working without a net. “So what do you think?”
“I think you should say adios to those talking camels,” I told him, and that made him laugh. Then I said what I had to. “But if you start drinking again, you’ll screw it up.”
Two weeks later he gave Overland his notice, and in February of 2012 he hung out his shingle in a tiny office on Main Street: George Reade Investigator and Independent Claims Adjuster.
He didn’t spend much time in that hole-in-the-wall; mostly he was out pounding the pavement. He talked to cops, he talked to bail bondsmen （“Always good for leads,” he said）， but mostly he talked to lawyers. A lot of them knew him from his work at Overland, and knew he was on the square. They gave him jobs—the tough ones, where the big companies were either drastically reducing the amount they were willing to pay or denying the claim altogether. He worked long, long hours. Most nights I came home to an empty house and cooked my own dinner. I didn’t mind. At first when my dad finally did come in, I hugged him so I could surreptitiously smell his breath for the unforgettable aroma of Gilbey’s Gin. After awhile, though, I just hugged him. And he rarely missed a Sober Sunrise meeting.