Chapter Seventeen“Okay, fire away,” Matt said, turning a skeptical eye on Tom.
“I met your mother at AA.”
“What?” Matt straightened up.
“This is gonna take a lot longer if you keep interrupting.”
“Sorry.”
“Yep. We met at AA. Your mom was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. She’d had a hard life. Her father beat her. He was a drunk, not that I should talk, but he was. And he’d get mean. He’d smack her, hit her with anything he could find. Her mother was useless. With nowhere to turn and no way to cope, Valerie started drinking when she was a teen. She came to AA at twenty. We met there and fell in love.”
“Did you get sober?”
“I’m coming to that. Pour me another, will you?”
Matt did as he was told. “Make it last. That’s it for tonight.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll sip,” he said, taking a
