“Shit. That didn’t sound good.” I took a breath. “You think I should go up?”
She opened her mouth to respond but Gene’s familiar knock came first. I opened the door. He was tense and his eyes were red, still dressed in the same clothes he’d been wearing this morning. He tottered in front of me, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, holding his right hand in his left. It was bleeding. I reached out to steady him but he swatted my hand away.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“We’re going to have to reschedule dinner,” he said through heavily slurred words. I had never seen him drunk before, and I could only guess at how much he must have put away to be as bad off as he was.
“Yeah, sure, no problem at all. But are you okay? Do you need to come in?”
He shook his head. “I’m fine. I’m sorry to have to cancel.”
“Don’t worry about it, Gene. No problem at all.”
He turned and went up the stairs. I watched him slowly and cautiously take one step at a time. Then he disappeared and his door closed.
“You have to go up there,” Carolyn said.
“I know,” I said, though it was the last thing I wanted to do. I went up ten minutes later and knocked at his door. I waited there a full minute before I came back down and called his phone. He didn’t answer. I wanted to call Linda but I didn’t have her number, so there was nothing else to do but let it settle. Hell, I had been in the same position more times than I could count. Most of the time I wished people would have left me alone, too.
5
Late night, Carolyn beside me. I watched her sleeping, her sounds, her twitches, her fluttering eyes beneath her lids. I ran my hand down the side of her face. Softly, so as not to wake her. She had tried so hard to make my birthday a good one, and it was. The gifts, the love, the hour massage when the sun had set, the time and complete attention. It had been a great day, but despite everything, at the back of my thoughts came all the same old nagging shit that comes with every birthday—fear, insignificance, regret, and, bringing up the rear, patient and confident in its power, was the past.