The topic at the Al-Anon meeting that night was detachment. How to detach from your alcoholic with love. From your drug addict, with love. From your personality-disordered relative, with love. As people around the room shared stories of sons’ arrests and daughters’ relapses, husband anger, parental neglect, panic crept up inside me. Those weren’t the kinds of stories I’d expected to hear, and they were resonating a little too well. I felt embarrassed by the similarities of our experiences, the way they overlapped, the banality of what had been so painful to me. I also felt an unsettling disgust with the presumption that I could relate to these people in some way, in any way at all, really. When Bonnie asked if I wanted to share, I chose to pass. “I’m just listening tonight,” I said, and a round of “glad you’re here” sounded throughout the room. The woman sitting beside me reached out and pressed her palm against the back of my hand.

We waited in the parking lot after the meeting. Some people wandered off and smoked, others ran to the Walgreens across the street. Greg ranted to no one in particular. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but that meeting was just a bunch of horny housewives who probably drove their husbands to drink.”

He was still going on about the meeting when the van pulled up, everyone piling in with contraband sodas and a lingering smell of smoke. “They should change their statement,” Greg said. “Al-Anon: friends and family of alcoholics who wouldn’t need to drink so much if their friends and family weren’t so goddamned whiny!” He chuckled and snorted a little. I turned around and glared at him. He shut up. I then looked straight ahead, through the windshield, and smiled. He didn’t need to know that I thought he was kind of funny.