It was Wednesday. For the last six months, on Wednesdays, Peggy and Greta had set up each week for the meeting. So, it was ready when everyone else got there. Margaret did it by herself now. She arrived forty-five minutes early, opened the door and put on the kettle. She’d bought a small carton of milk from the dairy on the way, and there was a plastic container of instant coffee, another of generic-looking tea bags, and a large one with white sugar in it. She opened the top of the sugar container and, seeing it, went to the drawer next to the sink and got a teaspoon. She fished out the clots that were made when people put wet teaspoons back into the container to get more sugar. People did that. The people that came to the meeting. Some of the meetings were using single-use cups and sugar wrapped individually in packets even though the venue provided some coffee mugs and a dishwasher. Still, she’d always brought her own cup from home when there were two of her, and she continued to bring one now.

Peggy and Greta had tried to help out where they could. It was annoying sometimes but it had made them happy. She needed to be setting up the room and fishing the clots out of the sugar to stay close. So much had changed and so much would change, and there were the bars. She looked out the window. The next-door neighbours’ backyard was close. She could see their washing on the line. It was a big house. There were lots of men living in it. She hadn’t talked to Diane about the bars. If there had been two of them going to the bars, eventually one of them would have said, ‘The worst ideas are the ones we don’t want to share with her.’ And they would have been right. They would have been able to provide evidence. Be able to say, ‘Remember when we went back to sex work? And we didn’t tell her about the money we were keeping in the closet and not paying tax on and how we decided to have a client over at our place so we would get all the money, and he stole all the money in our closet, and we had nothing? Remember? For all that work? Nothing.’ They would have been right.

Being sober in this way was a continuing journey into places and events that seemed completely different but were probably the same.