Gordon stumbles and the bartender keeps him steady. He realizes he doesn’t want the bartender to let go of him. The contact feels good. Shit, did he say thatout loud? He’s not a faggot. “I’m not a faggot,” he says. It’s just been so long since his wife slipped her hand into the crook of his elbow, so long since his daughters put their sticky little hands around his neck and whispered their sticky little words into his ears, the list of the things they wanted that Mommy wouldn’t let them have, but maybe Daddy would see it differently? The bartender’s embrace ends abruptly, now that Gordon is out the door. “I love you, man!” he says, for a joke. Only maybe he didn’t. Or maybe it isn’t funny. At any rate, no one’s laughing and Gordon “Go-Go” Halloran always leaves ’em laughing.

He sits on the curb. He really did intend to go to a meeting tonight. It all came down to one turn. If he had gone left-but instead he went straight. Ha! He literally went straight and look where that had gotten him.

It isn’t his fault. He wants to be sober. He strung together two years this time, chastened by the incident at his younger daughter’s first birthday party. And he managed to stay sober even after Lori kicked him out last month. But the fact is, he has been faking it for months, stalling out where he always stalls out on the twelve steps, undermined by all that poking, poking, poking, that insistence on truth, on coming clean. Making amends. Sobriety-real sobriety, as opposed to the collection of sober days Gordon sometimes manages to put together-wants too much from him. Sobriety is trying to breach the line in his head. But Gordon needs that division. Take it away and he’ll fall apart, sausage with no casing, crumbling into the frying pan.

Sausage. He’d like some sausage. Is there still an IHOP up on Route 40?

Saturday morning. Sausage and pancakes, his mother never sitting down as she kept flipping and frying, frying and flipping, loving how they all ate, Gordon and his brothers and his father, stoking them like machines. Come Saturday morning, I’m going away. Hey, hey, hey, it’s Fat Albert!