Chain of Evidence

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He heard her coming before she reached the top of the stairs. Wild and angry like someone possessed, the rage welling up within her from an addiction so powerful that two weeks earlier he had discovered her passed out with a bottle of rubbing alcohol still clutched in her spotted hand.

She roared at him as she dared to negotiate the stairs, suddenly a two-hundred-pound ballerina, one hand counseling the banister, one eye held shut to stop the dizzies. “You bring it to me, Boy!”

That was her name for him: Boy-the only name she had ever called him. They both knew what “it” was. The Boy got it from the neighborhood liquor store every day-or the days that she had the money to buy it. The old man with the white stubble beard handed him the brown bag out back in the alley, and the Boy carried it home dutifully. To him it was poison. To her, heaven.

She hadn’t had the money today, but she would have forgotten that by now, and she would have convinced herself that he was holding out on her, and when she became convinced of that then the world became a frightful place for the Boy. She possessed big, powerful hands, like paddles, and the stern will of a self-appointed tyrant. She knew nothing of forgiveness.

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