First day back after leave, they put me in a circle of folding chairs in a church basement.
Someone handed me a Styrofoam cup of coffee so bad it tasted like someone had boiled a penny. I drank it anyway. I needed something to do with my hands.
The room had a karaoke songbook on the radiator, left over from whatever happened in here on Friday nights. One page was dog-eared — 'I Will Survive.' I stared at it for forty minutes and didn't speak once.
A woman named Dara talked about her son. How he called her collect from a county jail and she let it ring. How she still hears the phone in her sleep.
I didn't have a story that dramatic. I just had a marriage that emptied out slow, like a tire with a nail in it. You don't notice until you're on the shoulder.
I came back the next week. Drank the terrible coffee. Dog-eared a different page in the songbook just to leave a mark, like someone before me had.
Dara noticed. She said, 'You picked a better song than the last person.' It was the first time I'd laughed in months.
I kept coming back. Not for the coffee. For the room full of people who'd also walked away from something and were trying to walk toward anything at all.