After about a year, I was in a nice amount of debt and had a small drug habit. I had to sell my father’s house for about half what I should have gotten and was scrounging around trying to scrape enough together from one day to the next just to keep the habit going. I had no permanent place to stay, no work, no prospects, and no worries. It hadn’t started that way – I had thought I would have a better life with a new start away from where I’d been all my life – but it ended with me worse off than before, and not realizing it. I didn’t give a shit. I thought I could stop any time, that I didn’t want to stop. Change would happen whenever I chose, I thought, but nothing was going to change. Then Froehmer called.

“I’m coming to get you,” he said. He drove down and found me and immediately took me to a treatment center.

“I can’t do this,” I said.

“Not by yourself,” he said.

“I mean, I can’t afford this.”

“You’re taken care of.”

There was a time when I thought Froehmer did it for my father; there are still times when I think he did it for me; and there are other times when I know he did it for himself. He had a reliable machine that had broken and needed to be fixed – like a trusty old tractor – that’s how he thought about it. And the repairs weren’t cheap. Froehmer might have done it for me, but not without strings. I was a name in the pad with a debt in the next column.

7

THE FIRE

“HOW’S THE GIRL?” Froehmer asked out of the blue.

We were finishing up breakfast at the diner, and he caught me off guard. It had been a long while since he’d asked about that. It had been years since I had reconnected with Froehmer, four or five years since he had helped me run off trouble when I couldn’t, and it had been a long time since he had reminded me of what he’d done for me. I thought we were square. I was hoping he was done with it.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t seen her.”

“You should make the effort,” he said.

“That’s long done.”

Froehmer took the last of his coffee and shook his head with disapproval. “A man should have a good relationship with his children,” he said. “You should see the girl.”

I thought he was talking about Denise, not Eva. I nodded. “I’ll make the effort.”

“Think about you and your father,” Froehmer said. “It could be like that, or it could be like we were, you know?”

I nodded.

“You liked me coming around, right?”

“Sure,” I said.