From the Publisher: “Mike Turner is eight years sober and still putting his life back together when a routine encounter with a common household product threatens to throw him back into active addiction.
Mike watched alcohol take his older brother’s life and wreak havoc on his own for 20 years after he advanced from a non-drinker at 21 to a blackout drunk almost immediately. As Mike sank ever deeper into alcoholism, he lost his job, home and dignity but somehow managed to hang onto his wife and four kids. After his home life spiraled out of control, Mike eventually surrendered and went to rehab where he was introduced to AA and God.
But now a quiet winter day alone at home leads to thoughts of his dead brother, Dave. And as Mike stands at the second-floor bathroom window watching the snow fly outside, a storm that has been brewing inside his head might be ready to blow.
Mike Turner suddenly finds himself at the precipice of a life decision with huge implications. And it’s a choice he will make with one hand on the sink…”
About the Author: Ken McCarthy is a financial journalist working from home in western Pennsylvania. He and his wife, Chris, have four children. This is his first novel. He has been sober since 2007.
Part One
Back into the Abyss
Chapter 1
It was snowing the day Mike Turner fell off the wagon. Even after all that followed, that was the one detail he never forgot.
The seemingly never-reliable forecasters had called for as much as three inches of snow, but by midday it was clear there wouldn’t be much more than a dusting. The snow was blowing sideways and coming down out of the low, gray sky at a pretty good clip as Mike stood looking out the small, second-floor bathroom window that overlooked Mercer Street, but only the grass was turning white.
He was home alone as he almost always was during the workday. Stephanie was working and the kids were at school, although Carolyn, his daughter, had begun the countdown to summer vacation. In mid-February that was still more than three months away, but the kids could already smell the end.
On the street below, the U.S. Mail truck pulled up to the Turner box. And, as always, seeing the mailman turned Mike’s thoughts to his older brother Dave.
There in the late winter of 2018, Mike Turner had been sober for more than eight years. It was something he rarely thought about, really. Those awful dark days and nights of the previous two decades had been neatly tucked away — if not fully buried — and were only rarely examined.
When he finally got sober in 2009 — his “official” sobriety date was October 12, and he had heard at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings more times than he could count that if you didn’t know your sobriety date then you had not yet had your last drink — things had certainly spiraled out of control. Job, gone. Home, soon to be gone. Money? Well that was a laugh. The old line about not having two dimes to rub together was not far from the truth.
But, at the same time, he knew he had been very lucky. Those AA meetings in various dank church basements were full of stories with much worse endings than his own. His health was still pretty good and Mike still, somehow, had his family. In fact, he didn’t need to look any further than his own older brother to see how much worse it could be.
Dave was 10 years older and had been a hard drinker — the word alcoholic was never spoken in the Turner household, as far as Mike knew — from about the ripe old age of 18.
When Mike finally saw the light and found AA, Dave, a mail carrier, was 50 and talking about quitting the booze too. His wife had left years before and his health was failing. On Saturday nights, Dave would drive over, pick Mike up and take him to an AA meeting. Once in a blue moon Dave would go inside, but usually he stayed in the car doing God knows what. “I don’t want to listen to those people and their sob stories,” he would say afterward. “How is that supposed to help me?” Neither knew it at the time, but cirrhosis would take him in a brutal way less than a year later.
At the funeral, Dave’s ex-wife had approached and asked Mike how he was holding up. It was the typical banal funeral home conversation about how, although a death at a relatively young age was tragic, Dave’s suffering was over and he was in a better place. Mike was about to add the meaningless line about calling if she needed anything when he sensed there was more on Megan’s mind.
“Was there something else, Meg?”
“No, not really. I mean I can’t tell you how happy I am that you finally got help. I remember telling Stephanie years ago that you were headed down the same path. I just wish Dave would have done what you did while there was still time.”
“Yeah, he tried at the end. Sort of anyway. I guess it was just too little too late.”
Megan didn’t respond but stared for a beat longer than seemed normal. “What is it, Meg?” Mike asked.
“Don’t take this the wrong way Mike, but I just don’t understand how you got out in time and he couldn’t. It’s not fair. I can’t help but think about what might have happened if he quit at your age. We could have still had a life together. There were so many things we wanted to do and see. I don’t get it.”
At only nine months removed from his last drink, Mike was clinging to sobriety by what at times felt like just his fingernails. He barely knew how he was making it, let alone try to explain why someone else could not. He said the only thing he could think of.
“God works in mysterious ways.”
As he stood watching the snow smack the glass seven years later, Mike felt the loss of his big brother so strongly that tears stung his eyes. He was emotional by nature, and thoughts of Dave often triggered him. Mike felt guilty because at times it seemed like he missed Dave more than he missed either of his parents. His dad had been gone for decades, and his mother had died about a year before. He thought of them both often, but somehow David’s absence in his life was more painful.
He turned away from the window and was about to head downstairs to make himself a sandwich for lunch when the toilet caught his eye. The seat was loose and had a habit of shifting and making an awkward thump on the bowl if the person sitting on it moved the wrong way. Mike was far from handy — and that was being kind — but he could handle some small tasks around the house. Tightening a loose toilet seat would fall into that category and had been on his to-do list for weeks.
He grabbed a screwdriver from the cabinet under the sink, made a couple quick twists and felt momentarily like Tim “the Toolman” Taylor from that old sitcom. Small victories indeed. He then walked over to the sink and washed his hands. There was a bottle of hand sanitizer sitting next to the soap, and because he was about to eat, he figured what the hell and pumped some of that into his palm too.
As he was rubbing the sanitizer into his hands, the smell of the alcohol in it hit him hard. Mike didn’t know if it was just the brand that Stephanie usually bought or if all sanitizers carried a similar odor, but his mind immediately associated it with vodka — his preferred poison toward the end of his drinking career. Worse, the smell had the same physical impact that it did almost every time he used it. His mouth began to water. If that wasn’t sick he didn’t know what was.
Normally, such a reaction would cause Mike to shake his head and count his lucky stars that all that madness was behind him. Those countless days waking in a haze after a night (and maybe the previous day too) spent with a cheap bottle of vodka and then trying to piece together what the hell had happened. More than once those mornings-after also began with Mike trying to figure out why he was looking up at the underside of the dining room table.
Steph would ignore him all day or, worse, regard him with pity as they rattled around the apartment. But at some point, usually late in the day, she’d approach and say “do you know what you did?”
In reality, he didn’t want to know. He never verbalized it, but what he wanted to say every time Steph asked if he remembered what had happened during the previous day’s blackout was “no. And please, please don’t tell me.” But she always would. And because more often than not the truth wasn’t as bad as he imagined and certainly was not as bad as it could have been, the next drinking session was soon at hand.
He had used that same brand of hand sanitizer countless times without incident. But on that particular blustery winter day something was different.
One of the popular AA sayings (and boy there were a lot of them) was that the alcoholic had no effective mental defense to taking the first drink. Without working a program of recovery that included a heavy dose of AA meetings and prayer, the siren song of booze would eventually prove too strong for any real alcoholic, or so the thinking went.
And, truth be told, it had been years since Mike had darkened the doorway of an AA meeting. Sure, in those terrifying days of early recovery he had sought the kinship and comfort of those gatherings of similarly-afflicted men and women on nearly a daily basis.
But recently, not so much.
And why was that? There were lots of excuses he could tell himself. The fact that he was busy enjoying the life AA had helped him to recapture would rank near the top of the list and certainly contained elements of truth. He would also point out that he never truly felt like he belonged in AA.
But in those rare moments when he completely put the bullshit aside he would have to concede that he never gave himself completely to the program and certainly never worked all 12 steps. Admit he was powerless over alcohol? Sure. By the end he’d have had to be blind not to realize that. But make amends to everyone he had ever harmed or tell another person the exact nature of all those hideous incidents that were now hidden in the haze? No way.
So on that dreary February day when the smell of the sanitizer hit his brain and some very bad thoughts began to creep in, Mike did not call his AA sponsor as he’d been taught, he did not fall to his knees and ask God for help as had been suggested. He did not even reach for his AA Big Book that sat near his bed not 20 feet away.
Instead, he did two things in quick succession: He calculated how long it would be before anyone got home and he took mental inventory of his wallet.
And the news on those fronts was good (or horribly bad, depending on your point of view). Carolyn, his daughter, and Sam, his youngest son, would not get off the school bus for another three hours. Stephanie would be home a couple of hours after that, and the oldest two boys were away at college.
Money was always tight. Even eight years after getting sober he and Stephanie were light years from fixing the financial damage his drinking had caused. In fact, he was beginning to understand that in a very real sense it would never be completely rectified. The dream of buying a house, for instance, had dimmed over the years as the drinking intensified but was reignited with the optimism that came with early sobriety. Just lately, though, Mike was coming to grips with the reality that some holes were simply too deep to dig out of completely.
But a few bucks for a half pint of cheap vodka was certainly within the budget.
There was a moment when the crazy notion of throwing away eight years of sobriety for nothing was in doubt, when logic and sanity still had a chance to prevail. Mike stood stock still, one hand steadying himself on the sink and the other frozen halfway to his wallet. Part of his mind screamed out against what he was considering, told him what the consequences could, and likely would, be and begged him to stop.
And it almost worked.
But the hand braced on the sink rubbed an errant drop of the sanitizer, and when Mike brought it to his nose and that (horrible/wonderful) smell hit him again the mental battle was over. Whenever he looked back on that day in the years that followed, he always wondered about that tiny drop of gel and how things might have been different if his hand hadn’t found it.
This excerpt from One Hand on the Sink by Ken McCarthy is published here courtesy of the author and should not be reproduced without permission.
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