The Accidental Book Club Read Online Free

scent and faint beeping emanating from somewhere unidentifiable on the ward threatened to tug her memory back to an awful place of unsuccessful treatments, shed tears, and eventual surrender to the inevitable. She had not been in a hospital since they had decided to take Wayne home to fight his final losing battle. She did not miss the depressing corridors, the grim-faced people. “Can I see her? Where is she?”
    He turned in a slow circle, as if looking for someone to answer her questions, then scratched the back of his neck and cocked his head at her. “Listen, Jean. There’s something you may not know,” he said. “Laura is an alcoholic. I need you to understand that.”
    Jean tried to give a reassuring smile, tried to nod as if this were something she had a firm grasp on, but she was still reeling from the short rundown he’d given her on the phone. Her daughter was in the hospital with alcohol poisoning. On a Tuesday afternoon. She’d gone to work—which was what her daughter did best, work—and had proceeded to cause some sort of scene. They’d threatened to call the police if she didn’t vacate the premises and, hours later, during which time Laura had been God-knew-where doing God-knew-what, her friend found her, sprawled facedown on the front lawn, car keys still clutched in her hand. What in God’s name was understandable about that?
    “You told me on the phone she was drunk,” Jean answered, as if this settled everything.
    He shook his head. “Drunk and then some. But today . . . this . . . This is nothing unusual. Your daughter has a drinking problem. It’s gotten worse since we split, but it’s been going on for—”
    “What do you mean, since you split?”
    He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket nervously, glanced at it as if he didn’t know how it had gotten into his hand, and then shoved it back into his pocket. “She didn’t tell you,” he said. A statement, not a question. Jean shook her head. “Of course not,” he mumbled, then took a deep breath and let it out through pursed lips. “I left her about a month ago. I couldn’t take the drinking anymore. It got to be too much. And Bailey’s just been impossible to deal with.” He shook his head, wiped his hand up and down over his face a few times, and sighed; then he took another deep breath. “Laura’s going to have to go to rehab. There’s just no way around it. She’s been telling me for a year that she’ll quit when she’s ready, but she’s too far in to do it on her own now. She’ll never be ready. She’s going to kill herself. Or someone else.”
    Jean blinked. “For a year,” she said, trying to maintain a sense of poise, to not look like she’d been made a fool of by her daughter all this time. After Laura landed that big job of hers five or six years ago, she hardly spoke to her family at all. Kenneth never heard from his sister. Wayne and Jean received only the rare phone call, and they saw Bailey only intermittently. Laura always seemed to have an excuse for why they couldn’t come home for Christmas.
Things are crazy at work, Mom. I’m barely going to get time for Christmas here with Bailey and Curt. I can’t possibly get to Kansas City. We’ll just have to ship gifts again,
she would say. To hear Laura talk about it, Bailey hadn’t had a birthday party since she was ten. Wayne’s funeral was the first time Jean had seen Laura in well over a year, and here it had been another two years, and she hadn’t seen her since. But to not know her daughter well enough to know that she was struggling with booze so much so as to have ended up in the hospital felt like a failing somehow. She should have visited without invitation. She should have invited Laura and her family more often. She should have called more often. She was ashamed.
    “And Bailey will be with you?” she asked. “While Laura’s . . . away?”
    He rolled his eyes. “She won’t want to, but yes. She’ll have no choice.