*
Dolores doesn’t know what good wine tastes like. She pours a glass from the jumbo bottle wrapped in a cheerful pink label, the kind she started drinking when Tommy was born and she quit her full-time paramedic job to take care of him. “Drinking again?” Jay would come home from work and say over and over. Over and over and over. But she didn’t stop. Years passed at imperceptible speed, the way earth travels a zillion miles per hour through space, but, thanks to gravity, humans don’t notice a thing. Drinking was a fun thing she did with her friends, and then one day all the friends were gone, and a baby was there, and drinking was something as necessary as changing diapers or mashing bananas or building towers of plastic blocks for Tommy to wreck with one swipe of his chubby little fists. One afternoon she drank a whole bottle before dinner and drove Tommy back and forth to the Tops supermarket to buy a frozen pizza. “How many times have you driven him around like this?” Jay had yelled, his consonants like thunderclaps in her ear. Many times. She had done this many, many times.
On the condition she move out and get help, Jay said he wouldn’t involve the state. So she sat through one AA meeting in a church basement—the dismal stratus of cigarette smoke, the Styrofoam coffee cups in everyone’s hands, the absolutism of their demand to submit to a higher power—and walked around the corner to the fire station to volunteer as an EMT. She would remedy herself. That was half a year ago.
Dolores places the stolen photograph on the kitchen table, propping it up with the cardboard flap attached in the back. She sits down across from the photo and takes her first sip of the wine, all the relief in that first glug tethered to the agony of needing it in the first place.
“Well, hello everyone,” she says to the inanimate family. “Hope it’s okay if I drink.”
The teenage boy, Bryan, is Tommy’s age in this picture. He’s wearing a white button-down, just like his parents, who are one of those couples that look like brother and sister. All three have full faces, button noses, and small, plump, open mouths revealing pointy incisors, like vampires.
“It’s kind of a sad story,” she says to the photo. “But I’m having a hard time. That’s why I’m talking to you, three people who aren’t real. Well, you’re real, but you’re not real here in my house. The real versions of you are in your house right now, probably doing something fun together.” She takes a sip. Outside, her neighbor’s old truck rattles along the street and backfires—as it always does—when he accelerates onto the main road.
“I’m a medic,” she says, as if they’d asked about her occupation. “I’m supposed to fix people. That’s what I used to do.”
She looks at the photo, envisions the husband putting his hand on her shoulder. It’d be heavy and firm, but kind.
“I used to be strong. Nothing got to me.”
She takes a big, utilitarian sip of her wine. The faster she drinks, the less she tastes it.
“Well, one day I just got so far down. Down, down, down. That was after my son was born—the time when supposedly I should’ve been happiest.”
The family continues to stare at her. She tips her glass at them.