Free Round Rock by Michelle Huneven

intended me to be—myself!
Bob K.
    He flung the brochure aside—how corny can you get?—snuggled into the cushions, and sleep, his dearest ally, carried him off. The next thing he knew, Red Ray was standing over him, hands full of mail. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! How the hell’d you get in here?”
    Lewis struggled into a sitting position. “The door was open….”
    “Scared the wits out of me.”
    “Sorry. I need some car parts picked up.”
    Red tossed the mail on the desk. “Just came back from town.” He sat down, still breathing hard. “It’ll have to be tomorrow. Okay?”
    Lewis nodded. Red slipped on a pair of half-frame reading glasses, pushed papers off his blotter, and began sorting through the mail. “Everything else okay?” he asked absently. “We treating you well enough?”
    “Yeah….”
    “Good.” Red gave him a quick, over-the-glasses glance.
    Here he was, finally alone with Red Ray—and tongue-tied as a starstruck teenager. He recalled his mission, however: to let Red know that he, Lewis, wasn’t one more run-of-the-mill juicehead. He wracked his brain. “I was wondering,” he said finally. “Is there a typewriter or computer I could use?”
    Red stacked letters in piles as if playing solitaire. “And what would you need a computer for?”
    “I’m a Ph.D. candidate in cultural history and I have to give a paper at a conference in March.”
    Red swiveled in his desk chair until he faced the calendar. Absently, he lifted the month of November, then the month of December. Behind December: empty space. They both gazed into it. The phone began to buzz. Red made no move to answer it.
    Lewis said, “If you let me use this computer, I’d be happy to answer the phone for you, take messages.”
    Red turned to Lewis. His eyes were kind. “How much time do you have now, Lewis?”
    Lewis knew what Red meant: how long had he been sober? “Fifteen days.”
    “Terrific! And you’re here for how long?”
    “Thirty,” said Lewis.
    Red’s forehead pleated. “Lewis, you have the rest of your life for cultural history. Why not take the next two weeks to get grounded in sobriety? Read the Big Book. Talk to other alcoholics.”
    “I’d clean this place up for you.”
    “You would, would you?” Red smiled, rueful, and tapped the corner of an envelope on the blotter. “Tell me, Lewis. Who’s your sponsor?”
    Lewis picked at the piping on the sofa arm.
    “You have a sponsor?”
    “No.”
    Red aimed the envelope at Lewis. “It’s a good idea to have a sponsor.”
    “Yeah. But …” The whole concept of sponsorship gave Lewis the jitters. One of the more excruciating things about life in the Blue House was hearing grown men say, My sponsor says I should do this; My sponsor says I shouldn’t do that—as if no one could blow his own nose without special dispensation.
    “Tell you what,” said Red. “You get yourself a sponsor, and if he thinks it’s a good idea for you to work on your paper, we’ll talk. Okay?”
    Lewis couldn’t say how unokay this was. He clutched the sofa arm, trying to think. Red returned to the mail and, after a few minutes, shot Lewis another sharp look.
    Against his own will, Lewis was embarrassing himself, behaving like a fool, like a clingy girl who wouldn’t take no for an answer—like that girl from Texas in his Shakespeare class. He’d slept with her once and she’d glommed on like industrial-strength adhesive. Dogged him everywhere. He would be at a bar and suddenly, on the next stool, there was Tex primly sipping a beer and radiating pain. He’d ignore her as long as he could, then break down and talk to her. Eventually, he’d grown curious: just how long
would
she sit there without acknowledgment? Hours. Several times, in fact, she outlasted him.
    Lewis, so strangely paralyzed, prayed he wouldn’t sit here for hours, a pathetic, groveling supplicant.
    Red spoke abruptly. “You say you like to write?”
    “I don’t know how much