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Sometimes she would want to talk to him and I’d say he was taking a nap and I didn’t want to wake him up, or else he was working (she never liked hearing that, not on a Sunday), or he was playing basketball with some guys from his office. She seemed to like hearing that the most, that Nick was out making friends and doing something healthy.

“What about you, K? Have you made new friends, too?”

“Yeah,” I’d say. “I get together with some of the wives and we shop and, you know, do things like that.” There’d be silence on her end. “And there’s one girl, Ma. She’s my age and kind of overweight. She lives nearby and we go jogging together four nights a week.”

That helped, a lie about making friends and taking care of myself. As soon as she seemed satisfied with my news, she’d go on about Frank and my nephews, their house, her thinning hair, the gambling trip to Atlantic City her two sisters were planning. But behind all this talk was the question she‘d never ask: have you been going to those recovery groups out there, K? And that was one lie I couldn’t pull off, anyway. So instead she would finish her calls by asking me the other true question stuck inside her like something she could only ease out by hearing me finally give the right answer:

“When do you think you two will have children, K?”

And for once in our calls I could tell the truth: “As soon as I can talk Nick into it, Mom.” Which was true when Nicky still lived with me. Saying this long after he’d been gone though, my voice sounded hollow.

ONLY THREE YEARS ago we were both into our second week at the program, and we had the same double dose—coke and alcohol—but the day before in Group, Nick had owned up to a third, porno. A lot of us couldn’t accept this as a real addiction, but Larry told us to pipe down and “hear” Nick. That wasn’t hard for me to do because even then, Nick’s body still coming off the ten-day binge of lines and beer and Southern Comfort that got him into an emergency room then the program, his fingers always trembling while he smoked, I couldn’t not look at him, at those hard blue eyes, at his thick black hair and pale face with pimple scars on the cheeks. His arms and legs were skinny, and he had a belly that showed more when he sat down, but all I ever wanted to do from the start was to feel my whole wasted body up against Nicky Lazaro’s.

Whenever he talked he threw me because his voice was so deep and didn’t go with his boy-look, and also, he spoke well, like he was educated or else read a lot of books. He said it was always worse when he was trying to stay straight, that instead of drinking or doing lines he’d be doing dirty movies. Sometimes he even called in sick at work and he’d rent a half-dozen hard-core tapes and spend hours and hours with them.