And he got out of the car and I didn’t see him for a couple of days. I texted him, called him, but nothing. I remember being worried that he was using again, but it wasn’t true. He called and told me he was back at the treatment facility.

“I just need to think things through,” he said.

“I didn’t do the job,” I told him.

“That must have made Froehmer happy.”

“I told him I knew the guy. He told me we’d be doing the next one for free.”

“It all worked out,” Frank said.

“You can still go to meetings,” I told him. “You don’t have to change anything.”

“It’s already changed,” he said. “For the better. But I miss being part of this, you know.”

“You can still do it. I can take care of this end.”

Frank came back, but it wasn’t the same.

He worked days – like a normal person – at the center, and by the time he was done, I was usually gone. We lived in different hemispheres of time; we shared the same space but rarely saw each other. It was almost like living alone, but there was enough evidence of him – a book left on the table, a shirt thrown across the bed, maybe a note left for me on the kitchen counter – to make me miss him. As if I didn’t miss him all the time.

I went to the job on my own, the way that I had before Frank, but it might as well have been my first time. I wasn’t quite sure what to do, or how to do it. I’d already forgotten how to work alone. Frank and I had quickly forged a true partnership, already developed an almost seamless way of working together, and the things I had done by myself before now seemed more complicated, more troublesome, and the things that Frank did, the things he was teaching me, I struggled with, couldn’t quite remember how to do them, or was afraid I was doing them all wrong.

My confidence was failing; my capabilities were down by half. I tried to tell myself that I knew what I was doing; I’d done it all just fine without him and I would be fine without him in the future, but it didn’t seem that way, not on the first time out, not on the fifth, not on the fifteenth. I had given him part of the job, and now I couldn’t take it back, not as easily as I thought. I would look for him in the passenger seat, hoping for help, hoping for advice, or just some conversation to get through the dragging minutes of the heavy hours of sitting. But he wasn’t there.

—