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Shane.
    “Sure, I bet you do,” laughed Rawls. “I bet she’s not too far from a bar or a liquor store, neither.”
    “What’s it to you?”
    “Nothing. It’s just usually when I get slapped into rehab, I try to at least give it the full thirty days before sliding out there again. Ain’t you tired of getting in trouble, just for a little bit?”
    In truth, Shane was. But not enough to want to stop drinking.
    “You know how to get out of here or not?”
    “Well.” Rawls slapped his hands together. “You can’t be here too long and not figure it out for yourself. I think they do it on purpose, like, to test our resolve. But the orderlies change shifts every night at ten. The fellas going out have some kind of meeting with the fellas coming in. There’s no one guarding the door, then. But I’m telling you, you’d just be hurting yourself if you went.”
    The number one thing Shane had on his mind was that he needed to get out of this place so he could go and grab a drink.
    He was going to get out of here.
    And that was his way out.

Chapter 5:
    Monday evening, after work, Olivia arrived at St. Margaret’s Hospice to visit her mother. This was her custom.
    The front desk let her right in—Olivia was practically staff herself, visiting there over three dozen times in the past two months. She would have liked to have made it every night, but her work schedule simply didn’t allow it, and Olivia had to eat and sleep and pay rent, like anybody else.
    Her brothers—both of them living in other cities—hadn’t shown up hardly at all. A few times in the beginning, then once early the week before when their mother started to deteriorate again. Olivia really thought that would have been the end, that time last week with all that coughing.
    She thought she was going to be in the room and watch her mother die—all those violent hacks, those loud whoops, blood spittle flying all over the white of her blanket and gown. At the end of that night, Olivia felt like she had aged twenty years, just watch death throttle at her mother like that.
    But death didn’t win that night. Harriet pulled through. She kept pulling through—so much that Olivia had continued to gently and positively suggest moving her back to a hospital.
    But it was like talking to a brick wall—her mother had accepted her own death, and was ready for the pain to end. No medicines to numb her mind, she demanded, and no resuscitations. The end would come, and that would be that.
    Olivia wasn't that close with her brothers—they were much older than her, Theo by eight years and Claude by ten—but she did love them. She understood they didn't have the money to fly in every time her mother was sick. But still, she could have used their support as their mother's condition got worse and worse.
    Once upon a time Olivia’s mother had been a great political activist. From feminism to unions to civil rights, she had worked for every cause she could find across the tri-state area. Her role, usually, was organizing—imagining up campaigns as ways to get people involved and keep people involved. That last part was always the hardest, her mother said.
    “Everybody wants things to change. Not everybody knows how to make people believe they can create that change just with a little persistence.”
    As a way of protesting the local stage company’s stance of hiring minorities, Harriet Martin had organized the city’s first “fart-in.” For a whole afternoon, she fed a crowd full of angry protesters beans. When the evening came ‘round, she handed out tickets to the gas-imbued crowd for a showing of Shakespeare’s Macbeth—and then after about the third-way mark, the magic began.
    “Can you imagine,” her mother would say, back when she was well, laughing riotously, “all those snobs wanting to hear about that ‘toil and trouble,’ when we were giving them a double double dose of the farty bubble!”
    The play didn’t make it after intermission—and the