Prosperity Drive by Mary Morrissy

Author:Mary Morrissy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

TWELVE STEPS

After a month in Faithful, Arkansas, Ted Gavin met Paula Spears in the only bar in town where he could get away from work. Skipper’s was the sort of place his students would never frequent. There were no happy-hour specials, no imported beers, and no bloated big screen tuned to sport. The only soundtrack was the low murmur of conversation and the thwock and rumble of balls from the pool tables in the back room. The other patrons were ageing, down at heel, occasionally raucous and seriously intent on quiet oblivion. They approached drinking with a steady diligence, as if it were a vocation. Joy and inebriation were intermittent by-products of the process but for a lot of the time it was work, something to be got through. As he settled in at the bar, Ted noticed the lone woman perched precariously on the next stool and said hello. It was an old impulse – from home – though he was careful to say it as neutrally as possible, so it could be ignored or taken for an unattributed grunt if unwelcome.

‘Howdy,’ she said cheerfully and that’s how it started.

Ted was relieved to have met Paula, to have met anyone. Even he realised that drinking alone in a place like Skipper’s would have been too despairing, too lonely, too effing sad.

They met at Skipper’s every Thursday – as if by chance. It had never become a fixed arrangement. Neither of them owned a mobile phone. They were pals, drinking partners, mates – he did not have the exact word for what Paula was to him. Female friend? Too cold and tame. Fuck-buddy? Hardly. He had never slept with Paula, never felt even the merest twinge of lust, and for Ted that was a blessing. (He had a history of miscalculation with women – with a few drinks he could come over all gamey but he couldn’t sustain the bravado.) Sex had never come into the equation with Paula; for starters, she must have a decade on him. She was a small, wiry woman with stick-thin legs and pragmatically chopped blondish hair. Her face was the only fleshy part of her – smooth, moon-like, with unaccountably merry eyes. Ted couldn’t have described what she wore – some nondescript uniform of faded denim and pallid cotton. He could not even say she dressed carelessly; that would seem too deliberate, too much of a statement. Paula’s clothes seemed immaterial, even to her. She didn’t excite strong feelings in him; in her company, Ted found himself slowing, mellowing. They pondered on trivia – why are suitcases in films always empty, where does the Midwest end?

‘The Midwest doesn’t end,’ Paula used to say, ‘it just goes on and on.’

Ted had only the vaguest idea where Paula lived and he had never invited her back to his hangar-like flat in a student block by the railway tracks. It was one large, high-ceilinged room, sparsely furnished, with a bathroom attached. The place was clad in aluminium siding and the acoustics were terrible.

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