Free Ninety Days by Bill Clegg

stragglers. Elliot is one.
    So Elliot lends me the money for the first month’s rent, deposit, and broker’s fee. I ask him because before I return to New York, he offers to lend me money if I need it. Some last scrap of vanity has kept me from going into my financial problems with him but he clearly detects trouble. At the time that he offers, asking Elliot for money seems out of the question, but weeks later he’ll be the one person I think I can ask. I can’t ask Dave for one more favor or helping hand, as he’s at the breaking point already, and I can’t risk losing Jean’s friendship—​ especially not now when I have so few people left. I have a strong sense that if I asked her, it’d be curtains. Her wealth, I imagine, must be a familiar elephant in the room, a known animal brushing against most interactions. Now that I’m wiped out financially, it suddenly becomes, between us, an entire herd.
    The first day Jean visits me in White Plains we go for a walk. As we walk I complain about how I’m not sure I can return to New York because I have no money, not sure I can stay in the rehab because it’s so expensive, not sure I won’t have to move in with my sister in Maine, and not sure I’ll ever crawl out from under the mountain of debt that has risen since the day I relapsed two months ago. It’s all I talk about because at the moment it’s all I can think about. As we’re walking Jean stiffens and goes quiet. She swats an invisible fly from her face and she doesn’t turn to look at me when I ask her if she’s OK. The elephant has its hoof on her throat and suddenly I recognize that the only way to make it go away is to name it. Loudly. So I blurt out something about how I’m suddenly poor, getting poorer by the second, and that I’m terrified. That I’m going to need to talk about being terrified with my friends, and since she’s one of the few I have left, I need to be able to worry to her without her thinking I’m doing so because I want her to solve the problem. So ditch me because I’m tedious, but not because you’re worried I want you to bail me out. I don’t remember what she says to this but I remember her laughing, and that by the time we returned from our walk, the elephants had lumbered away.
    So I return to New York, see the studio on 15th Street, and even though the rent is pretty cheap, I can’t afford it. The landlord and broker need all that money. Since Jean and Dave are out, and because most of my family is broke, I ask Elliot. The first time in my adult life I’ve asked anyone for money, and Elliot’s yes is as uncomplicated as if I’d asked him for a French fry off his dinner plate. As uncomfortable as the asking is, as grim as the circumstances are that bring me to the question, the yes is a miracle. The yes, with all its confidence and kindness, is like Jane’s kiss on the street near One Fifth, or Jean’s bags of food. It cuts through the plaque of shame and reminds me that somewhere underneath the wretched addict is a person worth being kind to, even worth betting on. And I do not look like a good bet, that much is clear from any perspective, but when I tell Elliot I don’t know when I’ll be able to pay him back, he just says, I’m not worried. I know you will.
    With Elliot’s money, May’s rent is paid. I have no idea where June will come from. I’m eleven days sober, have a couple of grand in the bank, and with less than two weeks before it’s time to pay next month’s rent, I remember the silver. Of course, the silver. I’ll sell the silver, pay the rent for June and July at least, and pay my mother back someday, somehow. At coffee after the Meeting House that night I ask Luke if he knows of a place that buys silver and he tells me about a guy on 25th Street between Sixth Avenue and Broadway. As soon as he says the address my stomach tightens: it’s in one of Jack’s off-limits trigger zones, just a few doors down from the office building where our