Cocktail Hour by Tara McTiernan Read Free Book Online Page B

audible now, "What are you doing here, Sharon?" He slurred the s in Sharon.
    "I'm sorry? Do I know you?"
    He leaned against the doorframe.  "Do I really look that bad? Oh, God...I just..."
    She stared.
    It was him. Alan, her always-together boss. Well, except at the company's annual holiday party in December and the family picnic in June. Then he always drank too much, talked too loudly, wrapped his arm too familiarly around Sharon, before Margie finally collected him and bore him off, his face contrite after she'd whispered in his ear.
    This man was more than a little drunk. He was leaning heavily against the door now, and his face was that of someone dying of poison. And Sharon knew exactly what kind of poison it was: gin, his favorite libation.
    Staring at him, she wavered. She could walk away right now. Wash her hands of this. It wasn't her problem. His family could help him.
    But then she remembered: there wasn't any family to help him. The couple never had children, their own parents were long dead, Margie was an only child, and Alan's older brother was ill and in assisted-care living. And she couldn't walk away, not after he'd been so supportive of her while she was going through her divorce, covering for her, looking the other way when tears uncontrollably appeared in her eyes, telling her to take the day off when she was at her lowest.
    "Oh, Alan. What have you been doing to yourself?" she said, choking out the words and trying to steel herself.  But it was hard to do. She had a weak mutinous stomach, an easily disgusted nature, an obsession with tidiness and order, and whatever lay inside the house, inside this poor shambling mess looking at her through the still-closed screen door, would surely push every button she had. She took a deep breath and forced herself to reach for the screen door handle, pulling at it and feeling as if it weighed a ton, a mammoth oak door rather than a featherweight aluminum-framed screen.
    What came after was even harder. The house had been clearly well-tended at one time, but now it was littered with abandoned finger-printed glasses and dirty plates on almost every surface, the cute red-and-white kitchen repulsive with its rotting stinking garbage and piled plates in the sink as well as encrusted pots and pans on the range. She kept stepping on intermittent scatterings of broken glass on the floor and when she opened the door to the closet-like pantry, large empty gin bottles and plastic tonic bottles that were piled there rolled out and under her feet.
    The worst was Alan, who had fought her at first when she started to clean up and fought even harder when she found the remainder of his stash of gin and began pouring the bottles out in the kitchen sink. When she was holding the second bottle upside down over the drain and watching the sharp-scented liquid glitter down into the basin, he grabbed her arm and she had turned on him, screaming out all her fury and pity and disgust, unable to stop herself, even when his face and body crumpled down onto the floor and he heaved below her, sobbing. At last she relented, put down the bottle and sank down beside him, tentatively patting his convulsing back. In that moment she realized that nothing would ever be the same again between them, that they were no longer simply supervisor and employee.
    Things turned around after that day. Alan started seeing a therapist, quit drinking – albeit briefly – and finally returned to work a month later, an official brief leave of absence having been approved. They started meeting occasionally for dinner after work, Alan issuing the invitation and Sharon accepting with trepidation, not wanting to get any more involved than she was. Their dinners were usually in the brightly lit diner, Frannie’s, across the road from the entrance to TMB's office complex.
    They’d sit in the florescent-glaring light talking shop and eating comforting homey dinners of pot roast swimming in muddy gravy or