“We are sometimes our own worst enemies.” I look up at the woman who runs the Narcotics Anonymous meeting. “Sorry for eavesdropping. I’m Cheryl,” she says. Her brown eyes look almost black, and her curly long brown hair is everywhere. “You must be Caroline. Father Rolly was telling me all about you last night.” Her smile fills her face, and I watch as she sits down in the same chair I sat in just yesterday.

“I thought you were only coming in at one?” I ask. She smiles and crosses her leg, and I have to say she looks so graceful.

“I got finished early and figured I would come around and introduce myself.” She puts her hands in her lap. “I should have thought this through and got coffee.”

I laugh now. “No need.” I put my pen down. “What you said before …?”

“About us being our worst enemies?” she says, and I nod. “It’s things that we do when we’ve been around addicts.”

“How do you move past it?” I look at her.

“My father was an addict, my mother an addict, and then my sister and brother both followed in their footsteps.” She starts to share her story. “I was the one pretending everything was okay. The one covering for them.” She shakes her head. “From the school, from their co-workers, from their bosses. Until I left them to fend for themselves.”

“How did you do it?” I ask, and she looks at me, waiting for me to expand on the question. “When did you finally say fuck this and let them sink?”

“When I came home, and the lights were cut off,” she says. “I had hidden the money for the electric bill in the bathroom in a plastic soap container that I put in a junk drawer that no one ever went in. I was wrong. When you are chasing your next fix, you search everywhere.”

“My son’s father stole his hockey equipment last night,” I say. “I knew that he was low. I mean, he’s stolen just about everything that I have of value.”

“But you allow him to come into the home,” she points out.

“I don’t want my son to miss any time that he can have with him,” I say.

“You mean you don’t want to be the bitch who keeps a child from his parent?” She uses the same words that Andrew threw at me last year after he sold our third television set. “Oh, I’ve been called more than that by my own father.”

“How do you do it?” I ask, waiting for the answer.