The Accidental Detective

coming clean. Making
amends.
Sobriety—real sobriety, as opposed to the collection of sober days Gordon sometimes manages to put together—wants too much from him. Sobriety is trying to breach the line in his head. But Gordon needs that division. Take it away and he’ll fall apart, sausage with no casing, crumbling into the frying pan.
    Sausage. He’d like some sausage. Is there still an IHOP up on Route 40?
    Saturday morning. Sausage and pancakes, his mother never sitting down as she kept flipping and frying, frying and flipping, loving how they all ate, Gordon and his brothers and his father, stoking them like machines. Come Saturday morning, I’m going away. Hey, hey, hey, it’s Fat Albert!
    When he moved back home six weeks ago, he asked his mother to make him some pancakes and she’d said, “Bisquick’s in the cabinet.” She thought he was drinking or whoring again, assumed that was why Lori had thrown him out. It was easier to let her think that. Then it turned out it was easier to
be
that, to surrender to drink and bad habits.
    When it comes down to it, drunk and sober are just two sides of the same coin, and no matter how you flip it, you are still your fucked-up own self. It sure didn’t help that his current AA group meets in his old parish school, now a Korean church. It’s too weird, sitting on the metal chairs in an old classroom. Drink and the line gets fuzzy. Get sober and the line comes back into sharp relief, but then everyone starts attacking the line, says he has to let it go, break it down.
Take down the line, Mr. Gorbachev
. Boy, he’s all over the place tonight, tripping down memory lane in every sense of the word. Funny, he has a nice memory associated with Reagan, but it feels like he was really young at the time. How old was he when Reagan made that Berlin Wall speech? Sixteen? Seventeen? Still in high school and already a fuck-up.
    But to hear everyone tell it, he has always been a fuck-up, came into the world a fuck-up, is going to leave as a fuck-up. Then again, whoever followed Sean was destined to be a disappointment. Sean-the-Perfect. You would think that with three kids in the family, the two imperfect brothers would find a bond, gang up on that prissy middle fuck. But Tim has always taken Sean’s side. Everyone gangs up against Go-Go, the nickname Gordon can’t quite shake even at age forty.
Go, Go-Go. Go, Go-Go. Go, Go-Go.
That’s what the others had chanted when he did his dance, a wild, spastic thing, steel guitar twanging.
Go, Go-Go. Go, Go-Go. Go, Go-Go
.
GoGoGoGoGoGo.
    Give Sean this: He’s the one person who consistently uses Go-Go’s full name. Gordon, not even Gordy. Maybe that’s because he needs two full syllables to cram all the disappointment in. Actually, he needs four. “Jesus, Gordon, how many times can you move back home?” Or: “Jesus, Gordon, Lori is the best thing that ever happened to you and you’ve got kids now.” Jesus, Gordon. Jesus, Gordon. Maybe he should have been Gee-Go instead of Go-Go.
    He thinks about standing up but doesn’t, although he could if he wanted to. He isn’t that drunk. The beer and the shot hit him fast, after almost two years of sobriety. He was doing so good. He thought he had figured out a way to be in AA while respecting the line. They don’t need to know
everything,
he reasoned. No one needs to know everything. There would be a way to tell the story that would allow him to make it through all twelve steps, finally, without breaching any loyalties, without breaking that long-ago promise, without hurting anyone.
    He gets up, walks down the once-familiar avenue. As kids, they had been forbidden to ride their bikes on the busy street that essentially bounded their neighborhood, which should have made it impossible to find their way to this little business district, tempting to them because of its pizza parlor and the bakery and the High’s Dairy Store. And there was a craft store with an unlikely name, a place owned by the family whose daughters had disappeared. He was little then, not even five, but he remembered a chill had gone through the neighborhood for a while, that all the parents had become strict and supervigilant.
    Then they stopped. It was too hard, he guesses, being in their kids’ shit all the time and the children slipped back into their free, unfettered ways. Nowadays ... he doesn’t even have the energy to finish the cliché in his head. He thinks of Lori, standing guard at the kitchen window