Yoga Cocaine

Chapter 4

4

After the meeting, April walks me to my car.

My keys jangle in my shaky grasp.

“Promise you’ll go home?” It’s part question, part command.

Despite the momentary reprieve, my thoughts have turned to liquor. I don’t want to get drunk, but one drink wouldn’t hurt. I could get a martini. Or a piña colada. Something girly with hardly any alcohol.

The first person to give me alcohol was my stepdad. Initially, I didn’t like the taste. But I liked sharing a secret.

Don’t tell your mother.

“Jess?”

I study the scuff marks on the insoles of my boots. When did those get there?

“Jess…?”

For once, I win the fight against my inner addict and tell April the truth. “I can’t make that promise.”

She reaches out her hand, palm up, the underbelly of her wedding and engagement shackles gleaming in the darkness. I give her my keys then follow her to her BMW. Climb into the passenger seat. Put on my seatbelt. It’s a familiar routine. April will drive us the twenty-seven traffic-free minutes to her stately Colonial on the Main Line in Wayne, just 3.9 miles away from where I grew up—also on the Main Line, in Bryn Mawr, where Mom and Dwight still live in the container of my memories. Tonight, I’ll sleep on April’s couch. In the morning, I’ll eat breakfast with her husband and their smiling six and eight-year-old daughters and pretend not to be wigged out by their cookie-cutter suburban lives.

April makes perfect pancakes and her girls refer to me as “Aunt Jess” and ask to braid my hair and wonder out loud why I don’t have a husband.

“You’re pretty and nice,” they tell me. “You should at least have a boyfriend.”

I was ten when my stepdad offered me my first beer. We sipped in tandem while watching the Eagles play the 49ers. When the Eagles won, Dwight called me his “lucky charm.”

In the morning, on his way to work, Howie will drive me back to this church parking lot and I’ll have amassed exactly twenty-four hours.

“Thanks.”

My real dad died when I was five and Chloe was a few weeks shy of two. He had a streak of white in his hair, in the front, and, after he was gone, I used to watch Maxwell Sheffield in The Nanny and pretend he was my dad. Once, hours into a Nanny marathon, Mom told me to turn off the TV and I dissolved into a sobbing pile on the floor. It took her forever to get me to explain why I was so upset.

“I can’t turn Daddy off!” I finally wailed, after an hour’s worth of coaxing.

But Daddy hadn’t had an English accent or three blazer-wearing offspring. Just messy, unhinged me, my perfect baby sister, and a wife who was very much alive.

“Don’t thank me.” April hits the button on her key fob, unlocking the doors. “Just get sober, then pass on the miracle to another f****d-up addict.”

“Like me.” I climb in and slam the door.

She slides into the driver’s seat and gently closes hers. “Like us.”