Ninety Days by Bill Clegg Read Free Book Online Page A

lights on and my cell phone pressed between my ear and the pillow. I get up to turn off the lights and find Benny asleep next to the door. I want to pet her, tell her how sorry I am for leaving her alone without food for over two days, but I’m afraid she’ll bite me again, so I leave her alone and go back to bed.
    It’s after one o’clock when I wake up the next day. It’s Friday and I’ve missed the 12:30 meeting at The Library, but I make coffee, eat a bowl of granola, shower, dress, and get out the door to make the two o’clock. Polly and Asa are both there when I walk in but I don’t recognize anyone else. C’mere, Crackhead, Polly says and pats the seat next to her. She is wearing what looks like pajama bottoms. Asa, freckled and immaculate in his usual uniform of tight Izod, jeans, and colored belt, sits on my other side. I’ve never been so happy to see anyone as I am these two. The meeting begins. There are two speakers—one with just over a year sober and the other with decades—who talk about early sobriety and the first ninety days. Of all days I should be listening, but I can’t stop thinking about the four-hundred-dollar cash advance I put on my credit card to buy drugs. I start thinking about how much money I have left on that card and the others. I tally up ten grand or so and begin to imagine how I could put together a war chest of drugs for one last bender and then make use of the seventeenth-floor balcony off my apartment. No pills this time, no chance of failing again. Polly rubs the back of my neck and I can smell the cigarette smoke coming off her clothes. The speakers go on speaking, a hat gets passed and fills up with dollars, people raise their hands and announce their day counts—twenty-four, eighty-eight, thirty. People clap. Polly raises her hand and says nine or ten or something in that range. More clapping. She pinches my leg, I raise my hand. One day, I say, and the place explodes.
    The meeting ends and as it breaks up six or seven people approach me, give me their numbers, and tell me to call anytime. I notice a short, thin, dark-haired girl wearing overalls and a striped cardigan whom I think I know from somewhere. I’m pretty sure it’s the on-again, off-again girlfriend of Noah’s screenwriting partner, but I can’t think of her name. She disappears through the door and up the stairs before I can remember.
    I go with Polly to the dog run in Union Square Park and watch Essie get humped by the smallest dog I’ve ever seen. She wanders slowly around the narrow dirt yard, but her suitor keeps pace, bouncing from behind on brittle twig-thin legs. Polly and I drink coffee and the afternoon slips by. She tells me about having been a competitive swimmer in college and, years later, getting drunk on beer in the morning before going to work teaching elementary school kids. Here we are, Crackhead, she says, gesturing with her right hand toward the dog run, and then, like a wise sober owl, says, Exactly where we’re supposed to be.
    Three days later I don’t see Polly at the 12:30 or two o’clock meetings at The Library. She doesn’t show up to the Tuesday meeting either. She doesn’t return my calls, and the few people we have in common haven’t seen or heard from her since last Friday. Despite Jack’s warnings that I should keep my distance and not chase after her, I hang out in front of the building where she and Heather live. She never appears. Finally, on Wednesday, she shows up at the two o’clock meeting, late, and sits toward the back. I try to catch her eye but she stares into her lap. She looks even more unkempt and ragged than usual and after the speaker finishes qualifying, she raises the same hand she used six days before to gesture grandly toward the dog run, Union Square, our lives. I’m Polly, she mutters. I have one day.

The Rooms
    I have eight days now and Polly has three. The last few days we’ve met at the 12:30, stayed for the two o’clock, and each