Things had started to seem promising the night before, after Jake and Coop left for the Chicken Box. Fray didn’t have many rules when it came to his sobriety, but no bars was one, and Leland said she didn’t want to go either. Fray thought maybe she was just tired—they were older now; at home, Fray liked to be in bed by nine, something Anna found maddening— but as soon as they heard the Jeep rumble off down the no-name road, Leland grabbed a blanket from a basket by the sofa and said, “Come with me.”
She spread the blanket out on the beach. She lay down and patted the spot next to her.
The second Fray opened his eyes to the starry sky above and listened to the crash and roll of the waves, he decided to share a realization he’d had earlier but had seemed too private to talk about at dinner.
“It’s the thirtieth anniversary of my sobriety,” he said.
“Tonight?”
“The Friday of Labor Day weekend thirty years ago, yes,” he said. “Do you remember that night? You and I and Mal and Jake went to the Box, and Coop stayed home to talk to Krystel. I went to the bar to get you a chardonnay. You very specifically asked for one from the Russian River Valley, I’ll never forget that, and they didn’t have it, of course, they didn’t have any white wine, only wine coolers, so I got you a beer instead, but then I couldn’t find you. So I checked outside and you were with that preppy kid from the city. You left with him.”
“That was Kip Sudbury,” Leland said.
Kip Sudbury: The name rang a bell, one more recent than that night thirty years ago. Was he a Wall Street guy? A hedge fund guy?
“He was involved in that bond scandal back in…”
“Oh, right,” Fray said.
“He took me to 21 Federal to meet his friends and the next day we went sailing on his father’s yacht.”
“Well, I sat in the back of Mal’s Blazer and drank by myself until the bar closed,” Fray said. Memory was a slippery thing. Fray couldn’t remember what he’d been served for lunch on his plane earlier that day but he could vividly picture himself in his Nirvana T-shirt, smoldering like a red-hot coal in the back of Mal’s car. He remembered being tempted to go with Leland and her New York friends because he’d thought he read some apprehension in her expression—but then Fray realized that what Leland feared was him coming along. She didn’t want him to embarrass her, and expose her for the regular Baltimore girl she was. “And then when we got back to the cottage, we realized Coop had left the island and I snatched a bottle of Jim Beam and headed down the beach.”
Leland turned on her side toward him and laid her fingers across his biceps. He inhaled her scent. She had always smelled spicy—like sandalwood and ginger—rather than sweet or floral. That was one of the many things he loved about her.
“I stripped down to go for a swim,” Fray said. “At least, I think that was my intention because when the paramedics found me, I was buck naked, passed out in the sand.”
Leland moved her hand down to Fray’s thigh and leaned in so that her chin rested on his shoulder and her words breathed straight into his ear. “I’m glad nothing happened to you.”
“I wouldn’t say nothing happened. The next morning when I woke up, I realized I had a problem.” Fray often wondered why that had been his aha moment. It wasn’t the drunkest he’d ever been. He used to black out all the time at the University of Vermont. And there had been one fateful night during a summer home from college when he bumped into Leland and Mallory at Bohager’s downtown. Leland had spent the whole evening talking to Penn Porter, who had been a classmate of Fray’s at Calvert Hall, and Fray was jealous. He’d done at least six shots of J?germeister at the bar—and the next thing he knew, he was waking up in Latrobe Park robbed blind with bruises all over his body and two teeth knocked loose. “I decided I would take a break from drinking.” That was all Fray had intended: a break. He certainly hadn’t meant to go the rest of his life without tasting the first sip of an ice-cold beer or the velvety warmth of a good red wine on his tongue. But once the alcohol had cleared from his system, he liked how he felt. Powerful. In control. The control was its own high, and—if you listened to Anna—he was addicted to it. “The break has lasted thirty years.”
Leland kissed his cheek. Her hand remained on his thigh, which could only be interpreted one way. Fray felt himself stiffen beneath his jeans. Anna had convinced him he was washed-up sexually, but that had been an excuse she invented so she could justify sleeping with Tyler.