He remembered. His father, Jim Dawson, had died in January of 2009, a heart attack in the parking lot of the hardware store where he had worked for thirty-one years. One moment he was carrying a bag of fertilizer to a customer's truck, and the next he was on the asphalt, and by the time the ambulance came there was nothing to do. Eric had been twenty-six. He had not cried at the funeral. He had not cried at all, in fact; he had simply started drinking, steadily and with purpose, as though it were a job he had been hired to do. First beer after work, then beer at lunch, then whiskey, then whiskey in the morning in a travel mug so no one would know. He had been a project estimator at a construction firm then, and he had missed deadlines, then meetings, then whole days.
"You never hurt me," Melissa said. "I want you to know I've never told anyone you did, because you didn't. But you scared me. You put your fist through the wall in the hallway that time, and you fell asleep in the car in the parking lot with the engine running, in May, in the heat, and the neighbor had to knock on the window, and when I asked you about it you didn't remember. You didn't remember any of it. And I thought, I'm going to come home one day and you'll be dead, and I can't watch it. I couldn't watch it. So I left."
"I know you left," Eric said. "I was there."
"I went to Jenna's because I didn't have anywhere else. And I didn't know if I was coming back. I need you to understand that. I wasn't on a vacation. I thought we were over. I'd already called a lawyer. Just to ask questions, but I'd called."
He had not known that. He took it in silently.
"Daniel was…" She hesitated. "We'd been friends since we were fourteen. We were in marching band together at Sabino, he played trumpet. We never dated in high school. He was just there, always, this good, steady, funny person. He'd lost his own dad when we were seniors, so he understood. And that summer he'd just finished his first year teaching chemistry at a middle school on the south side, and I ran into him at the grocery store, the Safeway on Speedway, of all places, and we got coffee, and then we got dinner, and he took me up Mount Lemmon because I said I hadn't been out of the house in weeks, and I…"
She stopped. Eric waited.