I looked at the green glow of the clock. It was two-thirty in the morning. Someone was thumping on the back door. My husband was away on a week-long trucking haul. So it was just me and my two daughters in the house.
I put on a robe over my nightie and made my way to the kitchen. I rummaged through our junk drawer filled with loose batteries, lighters, old lumberyard invoices, etc. There was a big police-use-ready flashlight in there. It was heavy enough to be a weapon, if need be. I grabbed it and made my way to the back door.
He was looking through the storm door. A man so drunk that he barely even seemed human. I kept the back porch light off so he couldn’t get too good of a look at me. The dark outline of him swayed, moving a half step forward and a half step back at the same time, trying hard to stand in one place.
Heyyywreckedmytruckneedtocallgottausethephone. The only words he said that I could make out clearly were truck and call. I asked him to repeat himself and he said the same slurred sentence. I gathered a few more words the second time: wrecked, use, and phone.
Now that I had enough words pieced together, I started to get nervous. We lived far out in the country, rural Ohio, surrounded by fields and woods. It was just me and the girls at home. There’s no telling what a man in the middle of the night might be capable of doing to a house full of females. Especially a man in his condition.
I’ll call a tow truck for you, I told him as I began closing the door, intending to lock it as soon as it was shut. As I started to close it, he suddenly called out. Wait, he said, much clearer. Gottausethebathroom. But before he could even finish saying bathroom, he began relieving himself right then and there.
He peed through his ratty jeans, the urine running into his muddy work boots. I clicked the flashlight on then. Up to that point it had been resting in my hand, on the ready. Now I knew I needed it. I shined the light right into his eyes. The high-beam LED was so bright, it was like a small sun hitting his face. He threw his hands up trying to cover his eyes. He stumbled backwards, arms windmilling at his sides, trying to steady himself.
With his hands now away from his face, I looked at him closer. His scraggly beard had pieces of vomit in it. He breathed heavily and his shoulders slumped. He looked defeated. His eyes rose slowly up, trying to meet mine. He had begun to resemble something almost human again. Wounded, lost and pitiful, but human.
His eyes finally met mine. I could see his pupils narrowing from the bright flashlight. I opened my eyes wider to be sure of what I was seeing. I gasped. He’d only been gone one week. One week. One week to fall back off the wagon. One week to push back years of progress. One week to destroy seven years of sobriety. One week to undo all the work we did to build a new life.
Peel those clothes off right there in the doorway, then go in and get in the shower, I told him. Struggling and grunting, he managed to undress. He staggered past me stark naked without saying a word. I turned the flashlight beam on the pile of urine-and-vomit-soaked clothes. This is going to be a long day, I thought to myself. I clicked the flashlight on and off a few times, hoping that maybe the sun would wait just a little longer to rise that morning. Wishing it could be that easy.
Richard Courtad is an Ohio-based writer of short fiction and poetry. He is a 2005 graduate of Ohio University. Richard’s work has appeared in Midwest Review, Talking River Review, The Citron Review, Frogpond Journal, Kingfisher Journal and Acorn Haiku.
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