It was clear that Smith had been through my room, dresser drawers open, newspaper articles I’d brought from home missing, though the mug shot was still wedged into the mirror’s frame. Tired but restless, I went next door to the café where I’d first met Smith. I took a seat at the bar, the place crowded and smoky.

The bartender recognized me with a nod and a smile, asked if I wanted my usual Pellegrino. I told him no, ordered a scotch neat. Lifted it to my lips, smelled the musky aroma. Put it down. I wanted it bad. I eyed the glass for another full minute, lifted it again, a dozen images playing in my mind: stumbling drunk along the Kill Van Kull, fights where I’d been too numb to feel the pain, blackouts.

I tilted the glass, the taste of warm liquor on my lips, my mind doing flip-flops… Yes—No—Yes—No! Then I thought about Alex and the way I’d held her in my arms while she had bad dreams and how she’d told me about her mother, and I’d told her about my drinking, and she didn’t seem to care. I thought about my teaching job, now on the line, how hard it had been to work my way up and how I might lose it. I thought about past relationships with really good women who I’d left or had walked out on me because of my drinking, thought about my last big drunk and crawling out of that dumpster.

I put the glass down. Asked the bartender to take it away, ordered a panini, even though I wasn’t hungry. Knew I was not past the danger, so I ate the panini quickly and got the hell out of there.

Outside, I found a cab. I didn’t know St. James Church or where Via Bernardo Rucelli was, but the driver did.

The room was in the church basement. They were always in a basement, this one with a blackboard and wooden chairs with half desks attached, the kind you have in elementary school. It turned out the room was used for Sunday school, though the meeting could have been anywhere: New York, Boise, Florence. Every AA meeting felt the same, the only difference being that this one was in Italian. About a dozen people, old and young. I sat, my heart beating fast as one after another gave testimony, thinking what I could say, should say—how close I’d come to drinking—but I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. It was like watching some bad Hollywood movie: guy at a bar having a second, third, and fourth drink, staggering along the street going nowhere, waking up disoriented, hung over and hating himself—and the star of the movie was me. I shivered. Listened to a woman say how she’d been demoted year after year until she was finally fired from her job for good, another talking about her broken marriage and crying, familiar stories.

I gripped the seat of my chair like my life depended on it because I wanted to bolt, to get the hell out of that church, to find a bar and have a drink. I locked eyes with a woman who nodded at me and smiled sweetly, as if to say You can do it, you’ll be okay. I wasn’t so sure, but the brief human exchange helped bring me back to the moment, the room, the reasons I was here. Next up, a guy, reed thin with sunken cheeks, looked fifty though he said he was thirty-eight, only a year older than me. He talked about two decades of drinking and drug addiction and how he’d been clean now for two years and everyone applauded, and I did too, clapped so hard my hands hurt.