The Crystal Head vodka bottle was grimy with dust, which made cracking it open and pouring it into the sink unappetizing. So when Jen came up from the basement, she tied it up in a plastic Rite Aid bag and left it on the counter to dispose of on the way to Whole Foods. Then she sat down to revise her shopping list.
Jelly to go with all of the peanut butter in the basement. Mayonnaise and celery to go with the tuna. Red onion.
Something special to make Chloe for dinner as a peace offering.
How am I going to cook with the power out?
She checked the oven. It wouldn’t turn on. Unless the power came back before dinner, that meant Chloe’s favorite, parmesan chicken, was out.
The gas burners on the stovetop still worked, although they had to be lit with a match. She could stir-fry a Thai chicken with basil and serve it over rice. That was a decent second choice. Max didn’t like stir-fry, but he didn’t like anything except pasta and burgers.
Jen went to the pantry cabinet. Not much to work with. They were out of rice. And pretty much everything else.
She sat down again, next to the tied-off plastic bag that entombed the vodka bottle, and looked over the shopping list again. Rice was already on it.
What else? What’s good in a power outage . . . that I can cook on a stovetop . . . and isn’t too heavy to carry home?
She drew a blank. Her hangover wasn’t conducive to organized thinking.
There were only two ways to fix a hangover. Time, and the thing Jen absolutely wasn’t going to do under any circumstance.
She went back to the list and tried to concentrate. Her eyes stared at the words, but couldn’t assemble them into meaningful thoughts.
Fuck it. I’ll figure it out at the store.
She put the list in her pocket and stood up. Then she turned her attention back to the Rite Aid bag.
Am I going to carry that thing all the way to Whole Foods?
No. That’s ridiculous.
I should smash it. Throw it off a cliff. Shatter the fucker on a rock.
Some kind of ceremonial destruction seemed appropriate. She was quitting forever. This was a big fucking deal.
I need a ritual.
Jen vaguely recalled—among the dozens of articles she’d googled over the past couple of years about addiction, dependency, and breaking bad habits—reading something to the effect that symbolic rituals could be helpful in making a decision stick.
There was nothing symbolic about just tossing a bag in the garbage.
Especially when the bottle inside it was so grimy.
She couldn’t smash a grimy bottle. She’d get her hands dirty.
Jen untied the bag, took the bottle out, and washed the exterior in the sink.
The skull’s blank, sunken eyes stared up at her from between her hands.
Drunk Hamlet. You evil little fucker.
Where could she shatter it? There were no cliffs between here and Whole Foods. There wasn’t even so much as a drainage ditch.
Memorial Park was out of the question. What if some little kid came by and cut herself on the broken glass?
Maybe I should bury it in the backyard.
Or hide it back down in the basement.
Emergency vodka.
Oh, Christ, not that idea again.
She’d gone the “emergency vodka” route at least half a dozen times. It never worked. It was too easy to declare an emergency.
Get real, Jennifer. If you keep it around, you’ll drink it.
The thing was, though . . .
Was her last drink on earth really going to be a glass of Two Buck Chuck? That she only half remembered?
That just seemed pathetic. No ritual to it at all.
I’ll shop better if I take the edge off this hangover.
SHUT UP, JENNIFER.
You deserve this hangover.
It’s not about that, though.
It’s about the power of symbolic ritual to reinforce a change of habit.
A clean break with the past.
A totem. A talisman. A symbolically meaningful goodbye.
Or am I just kidding myself?
Look, the power’s out, the car won’t start—the day’s already ruined.
SHUT UP!
This is ridiculous.
She stared at the bottle. The bottle stared back.
Ten minutes of internal monologue later, she was seated at the kitchen table, congratulating herself on the aesthetic perfection of Jennifer Riehl’s Last Drink Ever. It was a vodka on the rocks, poured into her finest highball glass from a gleaming personification of Death and perfectly chilled via the ideal ratio of vodka to ice.
So this is goodbye.
She raised it to her lips and took a long sip, savoring the familiar burn as it slid down her throat.
We had some good times. I’ll give you that.
It occurred to her that she should enumerate them. Forget the bad shit for a moment and focus on the good, back in the early days before it all went south.
This is a funeral. We don’t speak ill of the dead at a funeral.
Remember the first time?
Kelly’s lake house. Summer ’85. Three cans of Old Style, a bonfire, and Billy Shober’s tongue in her mouth.
Jen smiled to herself.
Goooood times.
There were others. So many others.
Michelle’s basement. Brad’s Camaro. Both proms. That whole summer after high school, working at the ice cream shop on Lake Michigan.
Rush week. The road trip to the Ohio State game.
Rum on spring break in the Bahamas.
Wine on her honeymoon in Santorini.
Bar nights at Wharton.
The Guinness she drank every night when she was breastfeeding Chloe. So good. And medically prescribed! The pediatrician had recommended dark beer while nursing.
Jen tipped the glass back, the half-melted ice cubes tumbling against her lips.
Shit, that wasn’t enough.
Just a tease, really.
She looked at the bottle. It was nearly full.
What if that was my . . . Second to Last Drink Ever?
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
Get up and get to the store!
She looked at the clock on the stove.
But there was no clock. The power was out.
She shook a couple ice cubes into her mouth and chewed them pensively.
Aesthetically speaking, Jen’s Absolutely Positively Last Drink Ever was a real disappointment. The ice cubes, transplanted from a defrosting freezer to a bowl that had been left for too long at room temperature, had lost all their potency. They floated atop the vodka like dead minnows, shrinking so fast that they barely clinked as Jen raised the glass to her lips.
Not only that, but Skully—as she’d recently christened him—was no longer gleaming. When Jen tried to poetically contemplate his visage, the eyes staring back at her were smudgy with her own fingerprints.
Somewhere along the way, the symbolic clarity of the moment had blurred into what was starting to feel like just another Tuesday.
I gotta get to the store.
Can’t drive like this, though.
Oh, right.
Can’t drive anyway. Gotta walk.
Shit, that’s a hike. Especially with groceries.
Did I eat breakfast? I should definitely—
The thought was interrupted by the click-creak-shwuuush of the front door opening.
FUCK—
Instantly, she was up and moving, her heart pounding from fear of exposure. She flung open the undersink cabinet and shoved the bottle inside, way in back, next to the Drano. The rest of the drink went down her throat. The highball glass went in the back of the dishwasher.
She slammed it shut and turned around as her husband entered the room.