Where I'm Calling From

was only if they went out on the town, which was not often, or else when they had company over. Then a time comes, he doesn’t know why, when he makes the switch from beer to gin-and-tonic.
    And he’d have more gin-and-tonic after dinner, sitting in front of the TV. There was always a glass of gin-and-tonic in his hand. He says he actually liked the taste of it. He began stopping off after work for drinks before he went home to have more drinks. Then he began missing some dinners. He just wouldn’t show up. Or else he’d show up, but he wouldn’t want anything to eat. He’d filled up on snacks at the bar.
    Sometimes he’d walk in the door and for no good reason throw his lunch pail across the living room.
    When Roxy yelled at him, he’d turn around and go out again. He moved his drinking time up to early afternoon, while he was still supposed to be working. He tells me that he was starting off the morning with a couple of drinks. He’d have a belt of the stuff before he brushed his teeth. Then he’d have his coffee. He’d go to work with a thermos bottle of vodka in his lunch pail.
    J.P. quits talking. He just clams up. What’s going on? I’m listening. It’s helping me relax, for one thing.
    It’s taking me away from my own situation. After a minute, I say, “What the hell? Go on, J.P.” He’s pulling his chin. But pretty soon he starts talking again.
    J.P. and Roxy are having some real fights now. I mean fights. J.P. says that one time she hit him in the face with her fist and broke his nose. “Look at this,” he says. “Right here.” He shows me a line across the bridge of his nose. “That’s a broken nose.” He returned the favor. He dislocated her shoulder for her.
    Another time he split her lip. They beat on each other in front of the kids. Things got out of hand. But he kept on drinking. He couldn’t stop. And nothing could make him stop. Not even with Roxy’s dad and her brother threatening to beat the hell out of him. They told Roxy she should take the kids and clear out.
    But Roxy said it was her problem. She got herself into it, and she’d solve it.
    Now J.P. gets real quiet again. He hunches his shoulders and pulls down in his chair. He watches a car driving down the road between this place and the hills.
    I say, “I want to hear the rest of this, J.P. You better keep talking.”
    “I just don’t know,” he says. He shrugs.
    “It’s all right,” I say. And I mean it’s okay for him to tell it. “Go on, J.P.”
    One way she tried to fix things, J.P. says, was by finding a boyfriend. J.P. would like to know how she found the time with the house and kids.
    I look at him and I’m surprised. He’s a grown man. “If you want to do that,” I say, “you find the time.
    You make the time.”
    J.P. shakes his head. “I guess so,” he says.
    Anyway, he found out about it—about Roxy’s boyfriend—and he went wild. He manages to get Roxy’s wedding ring off her finger. And when he does, he cuts it into several pieces with a pair of wire-cutters.
    Good, solid fun. They’d already gone a couple of rounds on this occasion. On his way to work the next morning, he gets arrested on a drunk charge. He loses his driver’s license. He can’t drive the truck to work anymore. Just as well, he says. He’d already fallen off a roof the week before and broken his thumb. It was just a matter of time until he broke his neck, he says.
    He was here at Frank Martin’s to dry out and to figure how to get his life back on track. But he wasn’t here against his will, any more than I was. We weren’t locked up. We could leave any time we wanted.
    But a minimum stay of a week was recommended, and two weeks or a month was, as they put it, “strongly advised.”
    As I said, this is my second time at Frank Martin’s. When I was trying to sign a check to pay in advance for a week’s stay, Frank Martin said, “The holidays are always bad. Maybe you should think of sticking around a little longer this time? Think in terms of a couple of weeks. Can you do a couple of weeks?
    Think about it, anyway. You don’t have to decide anything right now,” he said. He held his thumb on the check and I signed my name. Then I walked my girlfriend to the front door and said goodbye.
    “Goodbye,” she said, and she lurched into the doorjamb and then onto the porch. It’s late afternoon. It’s raining. I go from the door to the window. I move the curtain and watch her drive away. She’s in my