Leaning on the counter, he watched her as she put a kettle on to boil and dropped tea bags into blue ceramic cups.

“You mentioned, I think it was at that Saint Joseph meeting, you almost went home. Where’s that, your home?” He had to think before he spoke and not refer to anything about her he had learned on his own.

“Bad Axe,” Denise said. “You know where it is?”

“Everybody knows where Bad Axe is. Why didn’t you go there?” He was interested. He was also groping, looking for a way to ease into telling her what was going on. Relieve his own mind without disturbing hers. Maybe if they got talking about real feelings and were honest with each other…

“I almost did,” Denise said, “I guess, wanting to feel protected. But when I’m home, I’m not ever really me, I’m somebody or whatever my mother expects me to be. You know what I mean? I have to pretend I’m still her little girl and, oh gee, is it nice to be home, it’s so good to see you, Mom, and all that shit. I love her, I really do, but I can’t be honest with her and tell her how I feel. She wouldn’t understand. She’s full of shoulds and shouldn’ts and she’s not going to change now. So I thought, why get into all that? I’ve got enough of a problem getting myself straight without worrying about offending good old Mom. In her own way, she’s as unreal and fucked-up as I am. But she doesn’t know it and that makes a difference.”

Denise looked at him as she turned and placed the mugs of tea on the counter. “That’s a habit I’m going to have to break.”

“What is?”

“Talking dirty. I always said ‘fuck’ a lot when I was drinking.”

“It’s okay as long as you smile.”

“The past year, I don’t remember having much to smile about.” She looked at him again. “Does that sound like ‘poor me’?”

“Maybe a little,” Ryan said, “even if it’s true.” He wanted to lead her along, get her to talk about herself. “How come you didn’t paint?”

“I was too busy drinking.”

“I asked you one time,” Ryan said and stopped. “No, I guess I didn’t.”

“What?”

“When you started drinking.”

“At State, I guess. I went to East Lansing, did the wine and pot thing. I guess I drank quite a bit, but I didn’t worry about it then. Everybody got high or stoned, one way or another.”

“Then you went to-what, art school?”

“Detroit Arts and Crafts. Did I tell you that?”

“Yeah, I guess. Or else I just assumed you studied somewhere.”

“It has a different name now,” Denise said, “like the Creative Center or something, and a new building. I went there three years, got very involved in fine art, mostly oils and acrylics. Then, well, I was living in the art center area, you know? around Wayne and the art museum, the main library-”

Ryan nodded. About ten blocks from where he had found her in the Cass Avenue bar, the Good Times.

“-and I felt I was into real life, there was so much going on around there. Sort of a Left Bank atmosphere with the art and the freaky students at Wayne and the inner-city stuff, the hookers and pimps in their wild outfits, all sort of mixed together. At the time I thought, wow, beautiful. Or bizarro, if it was a little kinky. That was one of the words. Or something would berserk you out, like a wine and pot party in a sauna. You see, I was very arty and open-minded, I mean as a life-style, not just on weekends playing dress-up. I was going around with a couple of black guys most of the time…” She paused.

Ryan waited.

“Yeah? You trying to find out if I’m prejudiced?”

“No, I was thinking, if I’d ever told my mother, God. Maybe that’s what I should do sometime, say, okay, here’s your little girl, and unload everything I’ve done. If she survives, fine. If she doesn’t…”

“What?”

“Well, it would be her problem, wouldn’t it?”

“I don’t think you’d be unloading,” Ryan said. “I think you’d be dumping on her, paying her back. You don’t have to do that.”

“No, I guess not. I keep looking for reasons, how I got here.”

“We can save guilt and resentment,” Ryan said, “if you want to keep it light.”

“And my Higher Power, God Honey,” Denise said. “I’m having a little trouble with that, too. I’ve got a long way to go, but already I feel good. I say it at a meeting and try to describe it, the feeling, but I don’t tell everything I feel. I don’t want to name names and put anybody on the spot.” She was looking directly at him now. Her eyes were brown. She was in there feeling good things about him, letting him know.

“I don’t think anybody tells everything,” Ryan said, “at a meeting.”

“Can I tell you?”

“If you want to.”

“Maybe I’d better wait,” she said. “Everything’s working out, then I begin to worry maybe it’s a false high. I get up there and find out it isn’t real but an induced feeling, or else something happens.”

“Were you on drugs,” Ryan asked her, “when you were doing the arty thing?”

“No, downers once in a while when my nerves were bad, but that was part of the drinking. I smoked, there was always grass, but I never cared much for the smell. What I liked to do best was drink.”

“The two, you mentioned a couple of black guys, did they get you going?”

“No, I didn’t need help, I sort of went that way naturally. They didn’t care. Then-well, I started drinking more and more until I was at it most of the day. It was what I did in life.”

“Was there a reason? I mean at first, were you depressed or just out for a good time?”

“Both, I suppose. I used it either way.” She hesitated and looked thoughtful as she fooled with her tea bag. “I got into a bad situation. I was married…”

Ryan waited. He wasn’t sure if he wanted her to go on.

“… in fact, I still am. We’re separated now, we haven’t been together in-I haven’t seen him in months. I don’t even know where he is.” She paused, holding her tea bag, and looked at Ryan. “Bobby was black, too.”

Ryan hesitated because she was waiting for him and he didn’t know what to say. He said, “Yeah?” And then he said, “Leary. It doesn’t sound like a name, you know, a colored guy would have.” Ryan froze, realizing his mistake. She had told him her name was Denise Watson. Not Leary.

But she was looking at the tea bag again, lifting it and letting it settle. “We weren’t together much. He was in and out of… mental hospitals most of the time. That’s not why I drank, I was drinking before that, but I guess it was a good poor-me excuse. Right?”

“It sounds as good as any,” Ryan said.

“Why we got married-I don’t know, maybe as you said before, to pay back my mother, if you want to get into all that, look for a subconscious reason. I don’t know, maybe I was punishing myself or I saw it as a challenge and thought I could save him from… the way he was, the kind of person. Or, shit, I was attracted to him physically, the cool, hard dude-I mean, talk about cool, Christ-he scared me to death. I wanted to paint him, too.” She paused, thoughtful again. “But I never did. Now-I hope I never see him, but I suppose I’ll have to. I want to get a divorce started and out of the way and I think that, getting it off my mind, will help a lot.” She looked up at Ryan. “Maybe you’ll serve the papers. Wouldn’t that be something?”

“If you file in Oakland County…”

He didn’t know what he was starting to say. She hadn’t asked a question that required an answer; he could duck around it. But he was sitting three feet away from her across the counter, looking at her face, her eyes…

“I do some work out here,” Ryan said, “and in Detroit, Wayne County. I like to move around.”

“Do you ever get into any weird situations,” she asked him, “where the people don’t want to be served?”

You bet he did, like serving a rock and roll band in front of thousands of screaming fans, walking right out on the stage…

There, they were off of it.

They talked about Ryan for a while, about serving papers and how he got into it, and about working in the cucumber fields north of Bad Axe. They talked about Denise’s new job at the A&P and almost got into it again.