Black Rose

wouldn’t go to counseling with her, refused to attend meetings, to talk to anyone about what she saw as my problem. Even when she told me she was leaving me, when she packed her things, and Josh’s things, and walked out. I barely noticed they were gone.”
    “That was tremendously brave of her.”
    “Yes, it was.” His gaze sharpened on Roz’s face. “Yes, it was, and I suppose a woman like you would understand just how brave it was. It took me another full year to hit the bottom, to look around at my life and see nothing. To realize I’d lost what was most precious, and that it was too late to ever get it back. I went to meetings.”
    “That takes courage, too.”
    “My first meeting?” He took another bite of his sandwich. “Scared to death. I sat in the back of the room, in the basement of this tiny church, and shook like a child.”
    “A lot of courage.”
    “I was sober for three months, ten days, and five hours when I reached for a bottle again. Fought my way out of that, and sobriety lasted eleven months, two days, and fifteen hours. She wouldn’t come back to me, you see. She’d met someone else and she couldn’t trust me. I used that as an excuse to drink, and I drank the next few months away, until I crawled back out of the hole.”
    He lifted his coffee. “That was fourteen years ago next March. March fifth. Sara forgave me. In addition to being brave, she’s a generous woman, one who deserved better than what she got from me. Josh forgave me, and in the past fourteen years, I’ve been a good father. The best I know how to be.”
    “I think it takes a brave man, and a strong one to face his demons, and beat them back, and keep facing them every single day. And a generous one, a smart one who shoulders the blame rather than passing it on, even partially, to others.”
    “Not drinking doesn’t make me a hero, Roz. It just makes me sober. Now if I could just kick the coffee habit.”
    “That makes two of us.”
    “Now that I’ve talked your ear off, I’m going to ask you to return the favor, and give that first interview when we’ve finished eating.”
    “All right. Am I going to be talking for the recorder?”
    “Primarily, yeah, though I’ll take some notes.”
    “Then maybe we could do that in the parlor, where it’s a little more comfortable.”
    “Sounds like a plan.”
    She checked on Lily first, and took the first phone call from Hayley. While Mitch gathered whatever he needed from the library, she pulled the tray of fresh fruit—David never missed a trick—and the brie and cheddar, the crackers, he’d stocked.
    Even as she wheeled it toward the parlor, Mitch came up behind her. “Let me get that.”
    “No, I’ve got it. But you could light the fire. A fire’d be nice. It’s cold tonight, but thank God, clear. I’d hate to worry about my chicks navigating slick roads on their way home to roost later.”
    “I thought the same thing about my own earlier. Never ends, does it?”
    “No.” She set out the food, the coffee, then sat on the couch, instinctively propped her feet on the table. She stared at her own feet, surprised. It was a habit, she knew, but one she didn’t indulge in when she had guests. She glanced at Mitch’s back as he crouched to light kindling.
    She supposed it meant she was comfortable with him, and that was fine. Better than labeling him a guest as she’d be trusting him with her family.
    “You’re right, it’s nice to have a fire.”
    He came back, set up his recorder, his notebook, then settled on the other end of the couch, shifting his body toward hers. “I’d like to start off with you telling me about the first time you remember seeing Amelia.”
    Straight to business, she thought. “I don’t know that I remember a first time, not specifically. I’d have been young. Very. I remember her voice, the singing, and a kind of comforting presence. I thought—to the best of my memory, that is—that it was my mother. But my mother wasn’t one to look in at night, and I never remember her singing to me. It wasn’t her way. I remember her—Amelia—being there a few times when I was sick. A cold, a fever. It’s more that she was there, and expected to be in a way, than a jolting first time.”
    “Who told you about her?”
    “My father, my grandmother. My grandmother more, I suppose. The family would talk about her casually, in vague terms. She was both a point of pride—we have a ghost—and a slight embarrassment—we