Walking on Broken Glass Read Free Page A

Dolores and I agreed I would voluntarily admit myself the morning of July 4.
     
    Leah Adair Thornton. Age 27. Middle-stage alcoholic.
     

3
     
    C arl … I’m checking into Brookforest, the rehab clinic …”
     
    Carl looked as if someone was approaching him with a rope and a fast horse.
     
    Seeing his eyebrows almost meet in the middle of his face, I was relieved he’d chosen a table wedged in the corner instead of a booth in the middle of the restaurant.
     
    The strategy Molly and I had concocted was for the night to conclude with my enlightened and sympathetic husband reassuring me all would be well. Already the plan required some tweaking. Maybe, before I blabbered on, I could guarantee background noise by paying a bus-person to strategically drop a tray of dishes.
     
    “How is it that you’ve suddenly decided you drink too much? Maybe it's not the drinking. Maybe you’re just having a nervous breakdown.”
     
    Carl had obviously not read the script I’d mentally prepared for him.
     
    I should have planned this better. Having breakfast as dinner to tell my husband of five years I’m leaving him for a month was probably frowned on by Dolores and the admissions staff at rehab. But after tonight, it might be a new question on the screening test:
     
    “Do you consider breakfast a more appropriate meal at which to reveal your addiction to a loved one?”
     
    When I announced I thought I drank too much, I theorized it’d be best not to be drinking. Although breakfast could be counted technically on the list of acceptable meals for having drinks. On our last visit to New Orleans, we’d reserved a table in the Garden Room at Commander's Palace. I had gauzy memories of sipping mimosas and Bloody Marys, listening to jazz, and sleeping in the taxi on the way back to our hotel. But our local Eggs in a Basket in my little suburban oasis was as far a cry from Commander's as I was from being an angel in a Victoria's Secret commercial.
     
    I managed to remain mute until waitress Tina finished jotting our orders and cruised off in the direction of the kitchen before I answered Carl.
     
    “Right. A nervous breakdown. I’m having a nervous breakdown—in the summer when I’m not teaching.” My drawling sarcasm shifted to rising frustration. “Besides, haven’t those gone out of style? Really, does anyone even have a nervous breakdown in the twenty-first century? What is that anyway?”
     
    Rhetorical question lesson.
     
    “What do you want from me, Leah? I think I’m meeting you for dinner, and you slam me with this?” He slid his fingers into the top pocket of his shirt, reaching for his phantom cigarettes. He quit two years ago, but the gesture lingered.
     
    Tina materialized from behind me and placed the coffee carafe on the table. She smiled at Carl, who’d started orchestrating his dining concerto. First, he slid the utensils from the faux-cloth napkin. Then, one by one, the knife, fork, and spoon pirouetted in one hand while he wiped them off with the napkin in his other hand. It was a ritual I expected at every meal away from home, but this was Tina's first show. She was mesmerized. Carl, however, was oblivious to his one-woman audience.
     
    Still no coffee cups.
     
    I leaned forward, as if on the brink of revealing tabloid information. “Tina,” I whispered, “what's the likelihood of finding cups for the coffee?”
     
    Her crimson lips puckered as if they’d just been pried off a lemon. She puffed her cheeks and sashayed off to what I hoped was the holy grail of lost coffee cups.
     
    Carl was either studying his reflection in the spoon or analyzing a smidge of gunk. I watched him. In that silly moment, surrounded by strangers and noise, I glimpsed the Carl of my heart and heard fragments of delicious laughter. It swished by like those faces on the metro in Ezra Pound's poem, like petals on a wet, black bough. If only I could collect them to reassemble a relationship.
     
    The high-chaired