“Half the country is addicted, don’t you watch the news?”
No, Patrick did not watch the news. No good ever came from the news. “How long?”
Greg shot his brother a look. That look, the one he picked up in law school and fine-tuned as a junior associate. “Three years, Patrick. It’s been almost three years. Since the diagnosis. Since I started gunning for partner. I couldn’t do everything. I couldn’t . . .” He reached for the words to continue. “Be what everyone needed me to be.”
Patrick rested his forehead on the side of the van, absorbing the cool from the metal. Jumping forward three hours in time meant it was pitch-dark, even though he was wide-awake. “Are you high right now?”
Greg glared at him with disgust until Patrick pulled his head away from the van.
“Does Mom know?”
It took Greg a moment to answer. “No one knows. I’m telling you first. Look, can we go somewhere, please? Even . . . I don’t know. McDonald’s?”
“Why, do you have the munchies?” Patrick responded with snark, even though he couldn’t remember the last thing he’d had to eat. Perhaps some sort of snack bar on the plane.
Greg stood and shoved his hands in the pockets of his sweatshirt jacket before looking down at his shoes. “So we can talk.” He looked up at Patrick. “I need you to take the kids.”
“Okay. Whatever I can do to help.” The family would need him to do any number of tasks this week, so he might as well step up to the plate. “Take them where?”
“Take them, take them.”
“I don’t underst—WHAT?” He scanned Greg’s eyes for any sign he was kidding. “Oh, hell no.”
“Patrick.”
“You are high. That’s absurd. You’re being absurd.”
“Patrick!”
“On its face it’s preposterous. I turned down a chance to present Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series at the Emmys two years ago. You want to know why? It was too much of a commitment. No. You’re asking the wrong person.”
“There’s a facility. In Rancho Mirage. Only ten miles or so from your house. There’s usually a waiting list, but I called this morning and they made a space for me. Extenuating circumstances, and one of the named partners at my firm knows someone on the board.”
“So, I’m not the first person you told.” Patrick didn’t know everything about addiction, but he knew enough to start tracking lies.
“I told work. I had to.” Greg sighed. “I have to do this now.”
Patrick thought back to when he smoked, in part to stay TV-thin, and how trying to quit right as his show was being canceled led to several relapses. And how a cigarette sounded so good right now in the face of this news, this new cancellation. “But is now the best time?”
Greg started shaking, determined to close the sale. “The kids are going to need their father, not half the father they’ve had for the past few years. Now is the only time.”
Patrick’s head buzzed with logistics; the walls of the garage felt like they were closing in, the floor and the ceiling about to pancake. The cars, and they along with them, would be crushed and discarded, junked. “I only brought two pairs of pants.”
“I want you to take them back with you to Palm Springs. The only way this is going to work, the only way I’m going to be able to do this, is if I know they’re nearby. They’re my strength. They’re all I—”
“Stop it. Stop it now.” Patrick didn’t know if he meant Greg’s shaking or the preposterousness of the request.
An older couple ambled toward the Cadillac parked across from them, the woman on the man’s arm. It took them an agonizingly long time to get in their car.
“For how long?” Patrick knew better than to even entertain the idea with such a question. But it just slipped out.
“Ninety days.”
“NINETY DAYS!” It echoed through the garage, sounding more like a jail sentence than a favor. He shouldn’t paint himself as the real victim here when a man had lost his wife and two children had lost their mother. But he’d lost someone, too. “You’re out of your goddamned mind.”
Greg burst into tears.
“Oh, god. Okay. Just . . .” He reached out to comfort his brother, but couldn’t decide where to place his hands. “You should know I’m an alcoholic.” Patrick wasn’t, but he was grasping at straws. Maybe he could check into this facility, too.