Since it was a Tuesday night, the Spirit Room wasn’t all that crowded when I got there a little before eight. I knew a lot of the crowd would start trickling in later, and in fact the band was still setting up, so I could tell they weren’t going to start at eight on the dot. Moving purely by force of habit, I went to the bar, then realized I couldn’t order my usual glass of wine. A pang of guilt went through me as I thought of all the wine I’d consumed over the past month or so. Not enough to get plowed every night, but still way more than anyone in the early stages of pregnancy should’ve been drinking. Well, I couldn’t do much about that. I’d just have to quit cold turkey now and hope that would be enough.
It also didn’t help that my cousin Marcus was tending bar that night. Sometimes he
