Eduardo's Arc

Chapter 21 of 60

Eduardo slept without dreaming, but he woke with a thirst. Not for water. He knew the shape of it before his feet hit the floor. The bank book was in the drawer. The cash was gone from the house. The urge had nowhere to land, so it went to the closet at the end of the hall. He had not opened that closet since the day he came back. He knew what hung inside. He walked down the hall in his socks and stood at the door and put his hand on the knob and did not turn it. He made coffee first. He drank it black at the kitchen table and looked at the sagging roofline through the broken window frame he had not yet fixed. The house was still a wreck. Cracked siding. Splintered rail. A porch step he had braced but not replaced. He had been working outside in. He had been avoiding the closet. He set the cup down and went back. He opened the door. The belt hung from a nail on the inside. Brown leather, cracked at the fold, the buckle dull. Below it, on the floor, three bottles stood in a row. Two whiskey. One clear. His father's brands. Half full, all of them. He had left them there eight years ago because he could not throw them out and could not drink them either. He stared at the belt for a long time. He hated it. He hated what his father had done with it and he hated that he had kept it. He hated the bottles the same way. He hated that a part of him had been saving them for a bad night. He took the belt off the nail. It was lighter than he remembered. He carried it out to the yard and dropped it in the burn barrel. He went back for the bottles. He carried them one at a time to the kitchen sink and poured them out. The smell rose up and his throat pulled toward it. He kept pouring. He rinsed the sink. He carried the empty bottles to the trash at the end of the drive and set them in. He went back to the burn barrel with a match. He lit the belt. The leather curled and stank. He stood over it until there was nothing left but the buckle in the ash. He walked back to the porch and sat on the braced step. His hands were shaking. The thirst was still there, smaller now, without a shelf to sit on. He breathed through it the way he had learned. It passed. The house was still broken. The roof still sagged. But the closet at the end of the hall was empty, and the thing that had been pulling him backward was ash in a barrel. He stood up and went to find his hammer.