“Or it meant I was suspended without pay for six months and never returned when my punishment was up.”
“Oh, shit.”
“That about sums it up,” Boone says before taking another bite.
I look at my popsicle. It’s starting to melt a little. Rainbow-colored drips spatter the ground like blood in a horror movie.
“What happened?” I say.
“A few months after my wife died, I was drunk on duty,” Boone says. “Not the worst thing a cop’s done, obviously. But bad. Especially when I responded to a call. Suspected burglary. Turns out it was just a neighbor using the spare key to borrow the owner’s lawn mower. But I didn’t know that until after I discharged my weapon, barely missing the guy and getting my drunk ass put on leave.”
“Is that why you decided to get sober?”
Boone looks up from his ice cream. “Isn’t that enough of a reason?”
It is, which I should have realized before asking.
“Now that you’re sober, why don’t you go back to being a cop?”
“It’s just no longer a good fit,” Boone says. “You know that saying, ‘Old habits die hard’？ It’s true. Especially when everyone you know still has those habits. Being a cop is a stressful job. It takes a lot to unwind after a shift. Beers after work. Drinks during weekend barbecues. I just needed to get away from all of that. Otherwise I would have had one of those cartoon devils always sitting on my shoulder, whispering in my ear that it’s fine, it’s just one drink, nothing bad will happen. I knew I couldn’t live like that, so I got away. Now I scrape by doing odd jobs, and I’m happier now, believe it or not. I wasn’t happy for a very long time. It just took hitting rock bottom for me to realize it.”
I give the popsicle a halfhearted lick and wonder if I’ve already reached rock bottom or if I still have some distance left to fall. Worse, I consider the possibility that getting fired from Shred of Doubt was the bottom, and now I’m somewhere below that, burrowing down to a sublevel from which I’ll never emerge.
“Maybe things would have been different if we’d had kids,” Boone says. “I probably wouldn’t have hit the bottle so hard after my wife died. Having someone else to take care of forces you to be less selfish. I mean, we wanted kids. And we certainly tried. It just never happened.”
“Len and I never talked about it,” I say, which is true. But I suspect he wanted kids, and that it was part of his plan to live at the lake house full-time. I also suspect he knew I didn’t want them, mostly because I didn’t want to inflict the same kind of psychological damage my mother had caused me.
It ended up being for the best. While I’d like to think I would have kept my shit together after Len was gone if a child had been in the picture, I doubt it. I might not have fallen apart so quickly and so spectacularly. A long, slow unraveling instead of my very public implosion. Either way, I have a feeling I would have ended up exactly where I am now.
“Do you miss it?” I say.
Boone takes a bite of his ice cream, stalling. He knows I’m no longer talking about being a cop.
“Not anymore,” he eventually says. “At first I did. A lot. Those first few months, man. They’re hard. Like, it’s the only thing you can think about. But then a day passes, and then a week, and then a month, and you start to miss it less and less. Soon you don’t even think about it because you’re too distracted by the life you could have been living all this time but weren’t.”
“I don’t think it’s that easy.”
Boone lowers his Drumstick and shoots me a look. “Really? You’re doing it right now. When was the last time you had a drink?”
I’m shocked I need to think about it—and not because I’ve been drinking so much that I’ve forgotten. At first, I’m certain I had something to drink today. But then it hits me that my most recent drink was a double dose of bourbon last night before Googling Tom and Katherine Royce on my laptop.
“Last night,” I say, suddenly and furiously craving a drink. I suck on my Bomb Pop, hoping it will quench my thirst. It doesn’t. It’s too cloying and missing that much-needed kick. The ice pop version of a Shirley Temple.
Boone notices my obvious distaste. Holding out his half-eaten Drumstick, he says, “You don’t seem to like yours. Want to try some of mine?”
I shake my head. “I’m good.”
“I don’t mind. I’m pretty sure you don’t have cooties.”