Snippet About P. #5

The next day, we went to the AA meeting, as always. Or it seems like always, though it was only our ninth week at the meeting. Many of P.’s pants no longer zip over his belly. The ones he was wearing that night weren’t zipped at all and you could see his hairy belly, perilously close to his pubic hair. But no one at AA cares about anything like that, which is a nice thing about AA.

I told P. that if we got over there a bit early, we might get to sit on the couch instead of on the hard bench. "Girlfriend," he said, "Can we talk?" This meant he wanted to sit on the couch, so we went over there and sat on the couch, and I brought him a cup of coffee not all the way full, and someone at the meeting marked a list to show P. the other meetings in the neighborhood.

P. wanted to go to the store after the meeting, but I really needed to get home and go to sleep, and it was after nine by the time we left the church, anyway. He had a moment of altruism and said he should just head home so I could also go home, but added that he didn’t know how he was going to get inside his house, as if he thought I was going to leave him in the middle of the street and walk off. When we got to his side of the street, he whispered that there were bad things happening in his house, but refused to say more.