When there’s nothing out of the ordinary going on in my life, I hardly drink at all. But when shit hits the fan, I tend to hit the bottle. I drank quite a bit when Jeremy left. A few months later, I was back to my normal, reasonably sober routine. Eddie’s suicide, though. That was a crisis. By four-thirty that afternoon, I’d poured myself a glass of wine and was sitting in my backyard. The backyard is probably my favorite thing about my house. A wall surrounds it, and Jeremy and I had filled it with all sorts of plants. Night-blooming jasmine, a couple of small Japanese maples, a ridiculously large jade plant in one corner, and pots of whatever happened to be blooming at the garden store. The whole effect was colorful and appealingly overgrown. The sun had begun to set, and I was having a moment of actual calm when my cell rang. I pulled it out of my pocket. It was Peter. Finally. “Okay, what something bad happened? Or did you just leave a cryptic message to get me to call you back?”
