There were always drugs handy on the construction crews; some guys couldn’t get through the day without a little something to keep them going, then they couldn’t get through the night without something to counteract what they took during the day. Pills got bought and sold, or sometimes handed out like candy. One of the guys called them the “giddyups” and the “giddydowns.” I never needed the former, but I did like the latter. I remember the first time they hit me, sitting at a bar with a few of the guys from work, and a few women who someone had invited to join us, and how it was like a switch had been turned on, like a puzzle had been solved. It was an answer I’d been looking for; I could be someone else for a while, not be myself for a change. Whoever I was, whatever else I was feeling or thinking, all the fuck-ups and doubts and hesitations, all of that was off somewhere else, a small shadow in the distance. I could be somebody else as long as I took a pill or two. It was that easy.

I hadn’t done any drugs, not much of anything really, except for when I was with Denise, before she was pregnant, I mean. We’d get together, drink some wine, drop a few pills and everything would be all right. What was there to talk about then, when everything is moving nice and everything else is far off and forgotten? Drugs don’t fix anything, they only make it seem like everything’s been fixed. Sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes it’s more than enough.

We got fucked up four times and four times we wound up in bed. She kept a box of condoms in the drawer of her bedside table. I knew they weren’t one hundred percent, but at first I wasn’t sure the kid was mine. She didn’t buy that box just for me.

“You’re the only one,” she said.

I found out later that it wasn’t true, but it didn’t change the math on anything.

“Are you ready for this?” I said.

“I’m ready,” she said. “You don’t have to go through with it.”

“I can’t get an abortion,” she said. “I’m Catholic.”

Not Catholic enough, I thought, to do without until you’re married.

“I’m not expecting anything,” she said. “I don’t want to get married, if that’s what you’re worried about. I’m not ready for that.”

We weren’t in love; we weren’t even all that close. We hung out and spent a few nights together and then she got pregnant because nothing is one hundred percent effective.

Frank said, “But you knew that going in. You weren’t really prepared then, not if you didn’t have all the percentages covered.”