The Ninth Step Read Online Free

before the bartender brought them.”
    “I’m glad, Cotton.”
    “’Nita? I’m really sorry about the other day. I had no right to go off on you like I did.”
    “You know I’d help you if I could.”
    “I wouldn’t be sober if it wasn’t for you, not that I always want to thank you for it.”
    Anita laughed her rich-as-brass laugh. The sound was contagious. It made him forget himself. Cotton had once told her, soon after they’d met, after she’d done a number on his head, that her laugh was her mojo. Her laugh and the way she had of looking at him like she could see clear through all his bullshit. 
    “So, you’re going home, I guess.”
    “Yeah, I think so.” If I can stay sober, he thought. Big if , smirked a voice in his brain.
    “Will you turn yourself in?” Anita sounded so bright, so hopeful. But then she’d never made  a secret of her opinion that she thought confession was his best option. In fact, if he’d followed her advice, he’d have surrendered to the cops in Seattle and instead of traveling on his own now, he’d be in the company of some lawman from Texas.
    “I may not have a choice since I wrote Livie.” Cotton still wondered what he’d been thinking. The moment he’d dropped the envelope into the mail slot, he’d wanted it back. I’m sorry? Like two words could fix what he’d done?
    “But she has no reason to contact the authorities. Last I heard jilting someone wasn’t a criminal offense. Chickenshit, yes, but punishable in a court of law?--I don’t think so.”
    “Is chickenshit a legal term?”
    “Moral, I think.” A pause fell before Anita said, “You know the first time I got sober and had to confront how bad I’d screwed up my life, not only confront it, but live every second knowing that everything I’d worked for, my career as a lawyer, my marriage, all of it, was over as a result of my love affair with the bottle, I went back to it. It was worse the second time. Coming back was worse.”
    “I can still see her, Nita, everywhere I look. You’d think six years of boozing would have killed off enough brain cells that I wouldn’t remember her, but I do.”
    “You’re talking about the little girl.”
    “Yeah.”
    “It’s because you’re sober now.”
    “I can tell you the color of her eyes.” Blue stained with terror . “I can tell you what she was wearing.” A maroon warm-up jacket over bright green jersey shorts with the number four printed in yellow near the hem . Cotton had wondered about her uniform, its mismatched parts; he had wondered at the smooth, round knobs of her knees that had been smaller than his fists. “I can tell you the color of her hair.” Dark brown, the same as polished mahogany . “I can tell you her mother had on a T-shirt so huge, I figured it must have belonged to her husband.” Cotton wiped his face. “I can tell you her mother died, but I can’t tell you her name.”
    “The police will know.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Listen, Cotton, you aren’t the first drunk to sober up to a boatload of legal problems and I’m serious, I’d help you in a flash, but even if I still had my law license, it wouldn’t be any good in Texas.”
    “I know.”
    “I wish you’d opened up more at the meetings and talked about your situation. The other members might have helped.” Step five, Anita meant. Admit to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. But Cotton didn’t care about step five. Or step three or seven. He couldn’t say any better now than he could have two months ago when Anita had dragged him into his first meeting what those steps said. No.
    The one he knew, the one that had jumped off the page at him had been step nine. The one about making amends. There he’d been sober for the first time in near six years with every nerve ending on fire, sitting in a room with a bunch of strangers, jittery and scared.
    Dry.
    His mouth had been so dry, his craving a thing with teeth, but somehow his eye had found that word: