Patricia was twenty-six, three years younger than me. She’d been in and out of rehab since college but seemed to have pulled it together in the last couple of years. I’d never been to rehab myself, but until recently we’d taken turns being the one with a substance problem. Now it was all up to me. She lived in New York and wrote lyrics for off-Broadway musicals; I was a freelance radio producer, which lately meant recording pieces about the Research Triangle’s homeless population and then being told to send something less depressing. Tricia has always been much more talented than me, and I was proud when I wasn’t furious about it. She and her writing partner were hard at work on a musical about Helen Gurley Brown, the already-overexposed editor of Cosmopolitan. It was a mercenary project—Tricia wasn’t really into that shit—but it seemed destined for success. Sex in the City plus Mad Men plus singing till your eyes fall out.

“Can we at least go to a bar?” I said.

“Steven, it’s Christmas Eve.”

“Tucker’s will be open,” I said. A couple of Christmases ago I’d passed out at a table in the bar and woken up on the bartender’s couch, naked, but, I concluded, inviolate.

“You should think of this as an opportunity to pull yourself together,” Patricia said. “You still have a choice.”

“If I stay in this house one more hour I’m going to lose my fucking mind,” I said. “I did a lot for you when you were in bad shape.”

“When I was an alcoholic,” Patricia said. “You are begging an alcoholic to take you to a bar.”

“Right, but you’re okay now,” I said. “I’m not.”

“It’s called enabling,” she said. “Didn’t you listen on visitor’s day? You’ve been to enough of them.”

I really didn’t want to go alone. I’d been having waking nightmares about Melanie, thinking she was behind me, hearing her voice in the room. And the idea of driving, after the ten-hour tear from Durham, gave me the shakes. I fled to my room and put on a Beatles record. “It won’t be long, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.” I cut out a line on my desk with my debit card. This was the decent stuff I’d gotten from a friend in the South, which I’d been trying to make last by alternating it with the bad stuff I’d picked up from a kid in town. I should probably mention here that I don’t know anything about cocaine.

I heard a soft knock at the door and opened it a crack.

“Look, you don’t need to be secretive about what you’re doing in there,” Patricia said.

“Sure I do.”

“Well,” she said. “Is it any good?”

“It’s fine,” I said.