Free Blame: A Novel by Michelle Huneven Page B

live with them.
    •
    As she courted sleep at night, Patsy drifted now to West Altadena, to the little orchard with the thick grass that the man was too grief-stricken or overwhelmed to mow. Or perhaps the woman had always mowed it, steering a push mower around slim-trunked trees laden with plums and nectarines, the daughter raking up behind. She imagined them in long skirts and long-sleeved blouses, working with the patience of former centuries, gathering fruit into wooden buckets or galvanized pails, fruit for pies and cobblers and preserves in clear glass jars, fruits parceled into bags and distributed through the neighborhood. And then, the orchard was untended, the fruit swelling and softening and falling into the thick grass, where it burst and rotted and was eaten by ants.
    •
    You win, Patsy whispered to Gloria as they began to say their names around the room. Annie, alcoholic. Rondene, ack-aholic.
    Patsy, she said at her turn.
    Good to see you, whispered Gloria.
    The dad wants to meet with me, Patsy said. I have to do something.
    The next afternoon, they asked Patsy to lead the meeting.
    In for a dime, in for a dollar, Patsy said, and recounted her life ofheedless careening, only to fill the room with laughter. I went to classes drunk. I lectured undergraduates about my sex life. I lectured bartenders on military history. I peed in my office wastebasket, then held office hours. Drunk, I’d sleep with anyone in my path—boys, girls, husbands, wives, students, teachers. That’s what I’m told. There’s much I don’t remember. I used to call people to find out if I had fun the night before or caused another disaster.
    And this kid, Ernest Cruikshank. Funny I remember his name. His chippy little girlfriend was bawling in my office: Your own student. How could you?
    I had no idea what I’d done. I told her not to worry—as far as I knew, it never happened. Even my old boyfriend Brice yelled at me once for feeding his little niece booze and piercing her ears. The girl was fine, but his mom—the girl’s grandmother—yelled at him for subjecting her to lowlife like me.
    A woman named Nel whispered to Patsy at the break that she too had hit someone with her car in a blackout, in her case, a policeman waving her through an intersection. She’d broken his leg, and a rib that nicked his lung. He was still alive, healed up in fact, and there in court to see her sentenced, the dickhead. Nel got five years, would be out in three, her lawyer clearly not as skilled as Benny.
    The next morning, Patsy woke up, sick with shame. In telling her stories, she’d heard them for the first time herself. The ease with which she’d dispensed cruelties! She’d never considered herself thoughtless or immoral. Fun, a little hell-bent, maybe, impulsive, but always amusing. And basically a good person. Now, seeing the miles driven drunk, the pranks, the commitments ignored, the marriages violated, and her obliviousness throughout, she seemed despicable.
    Was there ever coming back from such actions? Or does a person round some bend and the path back is lost for good?
    And she still hadn’t sent Mark Parnham the questionnaire. The simplest request by her main victim, and she’d put it off.
    Gloria told her to write a list of people she’d hurt when drunk, then write letters to them all.
Sorry I got your boyfriend/husband/kids drunk
. . . , she wrote.
Sorry I had sex with . . . Sorry I borrowed your camel coat and those Italian books and lost them. Sorry I smashed your garage door, sorry too about the crape myrtle. Sorry I fed you pills and alcohol and pierced your ears.
     
    Dear Benny,
    I want to make amends for my ingratitude and all the ostensibly clever but actually very rude things I said as you were really in there, trying to save my life.
     
    Not all the letters were sent, only those that wouldn’t reopen wounds or injure afresh. It never occurred to her that people would write back.
    We’re so proud of you, darling.
    I