Halfway down the hall, two doors stood open across from each other, light spilling out of both.
Leon slowed.
In the room on the left, folding chairs had been set in a circle, perhaps fifteen of them. A coffee urn was perking on a table against the wall beside a stack of styrofoam cups and an open box of grocery-store cookies. On the wall someone had hung a pair of cloth banners, blue with white lettering, one reading ONE DAY AT A TIME and the other reading KEEP COMING BACK. A man in a Ravens jacket was setting out pamphlets on a chair. A sign on the open door, printed on a computer and slipped into a plastic sleeve, said TUESDAY NIGHT STEP GROUP — 8:00 PM — ALL WELCOME.
The room on the right was smaller and warmer. A rug on the floor. A lamp instead of the overhead light. A plate of brownies wrapped in plastic. Six or seven chairs, two of them already occupied by women talking quietly, one older, one young with a baby carrier at her feet. The sign on that door said SERENITY CIRCLE — AL-ANON FAMILY GROUP — TUESDAYS 7:30 PM.
Leon knew those rooms. Not these rooms—he had done his own years in the basement of a Methodist church on North Avenue and the back room of a VFW hall in Hampden and, for a while, a converted firehouse in Remington—but he knew rooms like these the way he knew his own barbershop. The circle of chairs. The burnt coffee. The banners. He had not sat in one in eleven years; at seventeen years sober he had decided, in a way he now recognized as the particular arrogance of a man who has been well for a long time, that he did not need them anymore.
What stopped him in the hallway was not the sight of them. It was the day of the week.
“Tuesdays,” he said.