“Wait, was today the day you saw Jill? Is this some way you’re trying to…I don’t know…make it up to me because we had a little spat? You didn’t have to do that. You had a right to do whatever you want, Theaitsa.”
“I didn’t!” I told him. “I mean, I didn’t do it to make up to you. I just needed to busy my hands and stifle my head.”
Stefan walked into the kitchen, and I told him about Jill, and told both of them what she wanted. Jep only shrugged, and we sat down to eat. Stefan was distracted during dinner, only vaguely noticing a main dish he usually complimented extravagantly, and he was quick to clear off the table and slip away. Not long after, I saw him head out to his truck. Jep wanted to watch an old Alfred Hitchcock movie. I went to my desk and sank down into The Haunted Lady, then realized after a while that I was boring even myself. Nine o’clock. Then ten. Just after ten, Stefan came back, driving very slowly, dousing the lights at the verge of the driveway, parking conspicuously slantwise across it. Curious, I met him at the door, and he reeked like a brewery.
“You’re drunk,” I said, more curiously than accusingly.
“So what,” he said, nearly comically trying to stare me down first with one eye, then the other.
“You can’t drive drunk. Are you nuts?” Jep said, pounding down the stairs. As someone who had spent his professional life trying to channel the passions of young men, he was not only a single-beer kind of drinker, but a fanatic about sobriety behind the wheel. Ten years earlier, he’d lost a star player in one of those hideous black-road country crashes that killed all four people. The car rocketed so far off the road that police didn’t even find it for three days.
“I didn’t, Dad. At least not all the way. Will drove us to his place, so just from there. I’m sorry,” Stefan said. “But the fact is I feel like shit anyhow. Booze is its own punishment.” He followed Jep upstairs and I heard the tinny sound of cheering on TV. But then Stefan came back and sat slumped on the landing. I made him a cup of tea, which he drank like a man on Everest. I made him another, more sugar, please, Mom?
He asked me if he would ever meet anyone normal he could love. I knew that the key word was “normal.” I didn’t say anything, just made myself a cup of tea and sat down on the bottom step. The girl he’d been talking to online apparently for months now was finally ready to meet him in person. They had arranged to go to The Priory Dance Hall not far from Wisconsin Dells, a fabulous place that had been a convent but was now a restaurant, bar and dance floor on three levels. Stefan brought Will along for moral support; the girl said she had a girlfriend who was single and would like to meet Will. The girl had sent Stefan a photo, although not a very good one, and said that she and her girlfriend would be wearing bright yellow UW–Milwaukee jerseys and waiting for them near the reservation desk at the restaurant.
They waited for two hours.
At first, they thought, did we get the time wrong? And then they thought, did we get the meeting place wrong? Had the girls gotten in some kind of accident? Stefan tried to call the girl, who’d just the day before given him her number, but after the sixth time he’d heard the greeting Nothing new, just do what you do! he got fed up. A half hour later, the girl texted him with a profuse and qualified apology. She couldn’t leave her friend. Her friend wouldn’t agree to meet Stefan and Will.
What? Why? he asked.
Her friend was afraid of Stefan.
So Will and Stefan got hammered, which for Will was not uncommon and for Stefan was only the second time in his life. He confided that even being a passenger driving home along some of those serpentine roads, he was terrified. He felt like he was seeing some kind of contracting and colliding nightmare world where lights stretched and shivered and roads signs leaped out of the darkness like rabbits. When Will dropped him off, he got into his truck and slept for a few minutes, then woke up terrified by a guttural howling nearby he was sure at the time （not so much now） was human in origin.
“Party party party,” I said.
“So yeah. Alcoholism is definitely not in my future.”
“If this is what it took, as long as you didn’t kill yourself or Will or anybody else then I guess…” My words snapped in the air between us. “That’s a figure of speech. It’s just a figure of speech that people are going to use all your life and it doesn’t mean that. It does, but it…”
“Mom, okay, okay. Don’t worry about it.”