Kate Hits Bottom

At some point, Kate remembered someone telling her, you either change or die.

Actually, Brian Kunitz had told her that. He was telling her now.

“So then,” he was saying expansively, gesturing widely with his arms. “I realized then, that I had to change. What else could I do? I couldn’t keep living that life.” He took another long drink from his beer, some local microbrew Kate had never heard of. She was on her fifth wine cooler. “I couldn’t keep being Mr. Perfect. You know?”

“Yeh,” she slurred. “Shure. I get you.” Kate got drunk really easily. It was one of the things Stan liked about her. “I think that sometimes I was like that. As a kid. Like I had to be perfect sho my mom would be okay with me fucking up sometimes. But I never was.” It wasn’t really the same thing, and she knew it. But close enough.

Brian continued with his story like he hadn’t heard. “I came home from seminary and it was like, bam. I got what I needed to do with my life and it wasn’t what I was doing. It was like God was saying, Brian, you need to do better.”

Kate giggled. “Jess hated your gutsh for leaving.” She only sort of knew Jess, but she remembered Mark blithering on about the fallout. “That wash a long time ago!”

Brian set his beer down with a belch. Kate giggled again. She was starting to hate the sound of her own laughter. “Ten years,” he said grandly. “A decade. Hard to believe.”

They’d hooked up at Pete’s, where Kate had made herself a regular recently. Now they lounged in her increasingly dirty apartment, where Kate had invited him when the bar got too crowded. She’d had the idea of seducing him for some fun, but he seemed way more interested in just talking. That worked, too.

“We were soooo young,” Kate said.

“Were we? I don’t know,” said Brian shrewdly. “We think we were naïve and innocent back then, but I don’t think so. I think we were just different.”

Kate bobbed her head in agreement. “That is so true. You are so schmart.” She finished her wine cooler. “I think I have more of these.” She stood up, swayed, and stumbled to the fridge. Yes! Three more left.

“The life I have now is much more difficult,” Brian said, “But it’s worth it. I have to do odd jobs to afford food and gas for the van, but I can do those. I’m fixing the steps at the church, did you know that? They pay me for it. I picked up all these carpentry skills from a guy I met in Fresno.”

“I wish I knew how to do that stuff,” Kate said. “Hey! I thought you did other delivery! Things.” He’d said that earlier. She was dimly aware that his story kept changing and shifting. This was the third time she’d heard it. The first time, the carpentry skills had come from a woman in Alaska.

“I do.” Brian cackled madly, suddenly. “Sometimes! You don’t want to know about it! But I do everything.”

“So you changed.” Kate twisted the cap off the wine cooler. Exotic Berry. Excellent. “You change or you die.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Sort of like that, I guess. Maybe not die, but change or else. Change or suck.”

“Or die,” Kate insisted.

She remembered, then, who told her that, and it wasn’t Brian Kunitz. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “Allison told me that. Change or die.”

“Maybe,” said Brian. “For her, it was literally true. Mark was seriously depressed back then.”

“He’s seriously depressed now!”

“She is a lot better now than he ever was. Trust me.”

Kate giggled again. God, that sound. She was so annoying. “Life is fucked up,” she stated flatly.

“Oh yes.” He raised his beer. “To life being all fucked up.”

“Cheers.” She chugged the wine cooler, and gagged. Brian Kunitz laughed.

***

When Kate woke up the next afternoon to the sound of her cell phone ringing, she found Brian’s shirt on the floor next to the bed. Had she seduced him after all? She checked around the apartment, but found no other sign of him. His van was gone. Maybe he’d gone to work at the church, or to deliver pot, or sleep, or whatever he did all day.

Work. She dug through her purse, fishing out the phone. Six messages: all from the school. Oh shit.

She erased the messages without listening to them. She called Avery, her supervisor.

This was the third time this month, he informed her snottily. You need to shape up. Come in tomorrow on time.

Change or die. “Fuck it!” she screamed into the phone. “I quit! I quit!” She threw the phone across the room, it hit the wall and snapped into two pieces.

Oh God.

She ran into the bathroom and puked up her guts everywhere.