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the treatment center. No alcohol. There was no way I could go out drinking that night.
    When I get out of treatment, I’ll come back to this multistory building, I’ll ride the elevator up to this floor into my recovery—it’s called the Dry Dock meeting. But before that, before I get out of treatment, my boyfriend will graduate, and I’ll choose another one: Jason. When Jason first feels my eyes on him, standing in front of me in the bus aisle, he makes the sign of the cross. As if I’m a vampire. He backs away from me. He’s levelheaded, dark-haired, mature. He’s a higher rank than most of the sailors, used to giving orders. I don’t like the way he smells, though—a bitterness comes out of his pores, like the oil of a poisonous plant. When he gets a pass to leave treatment for the weekend, he drinks. But he has to return to us. I find him sitting alone in a dark stairwell of the center. Chastened, but not ruined, broken. I don’t remember ever kissing him, but by the end of the month, we’re engaged. He says, “No wife of mine is going to wear three earrings in one ear.” He says, “You can’t meet my friends in those pants.” I find it ridiculous that he thinks he can command me, but his certainty is reassuring. I go along with it, let him control me.
    I’m going to live in a trailer in Jacksonville, he says, while he goes out to sea. I like the idea of a new life, rooms all to myself. But before the wedding, I drink, fall off the wagon. Jason and I are at a hotel. We need a room. I live at home, and he’s in some kind of Navy quarters. On the way to the elevator, we see the sign by the hotel bar: “Free Drinks” it says. “I could get one,” I joke.
    “Maybe it would be fun,” he says. I’m surprised he would say this. I’ve been sober for two months—six weeks in treatment plus the two weeks since I got out. I haven’t been going to meetings veryoften. When I do go, sometimes I leave early. I tell myself I have to go to the gym and work out. That it’s healthy too. I can’t just sit in those chairs listening to people. It’s hard to be still for the hour of the meeting. I haven’t learned to be there yet, my thoughts racing, taking me out the door. I want to go to the bar, drink myself into another state. This is a pattern my life takes over the next two years. Relapsing whenever I put anything else in front of going to meetings. I need to go to meetings every night. Sometimes I need to go twice a day, even three times. But I don’t know this yet.
    Jason hasn’t had a drink since his slip while we were both in rehab. How can he think this is a good idea? The floor feels slanted, walls gray in this drab hotel. I’m not in love. Jason is safe, older—he’ll take care of me. I thought he would anyway, but now he’s suggesting I drink? Maybe he’s feeling confined like me, bored. I don’t know what he wants. It occurs to me I don’t really know who he is.
    I find a rum and Coke in a plastic cup in my hand as we ride the elevator. It’s familiar. Jason doesn’t get one. The hotel room feels too small. I don’t like Jason watching me drink. I hide my cup on the toilet tank in the bathroom. Then go back in there to drink it, secretly. I get tired of him, the dreary room—I want to go out. But there’s no way. It’s definitely not fun having a drink. My sobriety so new, I don’t even have a sense yet of what I’ve lost. As if the disease itself is buffering me. My drinking doesn’t feel calamitous, but I’m unmoored.
    My mom plans my wedding. She buys me a white dress. We select wedding invitations bumpy with engraving, mail them out. Restaurant booked for the rehearsal dinner. Two weeks before the wedding, Jason takes the bus down from Jacksonville on a Saturday afternoon. My parents are out of town, and we have sex on my canopy bed. But by 8 p.m., he’s asleep, a big man whose body overtakes my single girl bed. So, I leave him a note, say I am taking cookies to a sick