She’d brushed her teeth five times since the morning, but she was too hung-over to eat anything so she could still taste the grapefruit vodka, or it could have been the Fresca. She wasn’t sure anymore if it the alcohol or the aspartame that was sticking to her tongue, but her mouth felt thick and disgusting and her gums were too raw to brush again.

Drinking alone was a bad sign, she knew, but there were extenuating circumstances, especially now that she lived alone. Not that she drank often when she lived with Roy, but it was more frequently that he was the one mixing her a rum and Coke so she wouldn’t mind as much when he got wasted watching baseball or Die Hard.

Pam sat dazedly at her Goodwill dining table, scratching off a few flakes of the red paint. She had planned to re-paint it, but she more often than not ate standing at the kitchen counter and so it had been reincarnated as her art table not long after she started the art classes. Then there was no point in refinishing it.

The charcoal drawing she’d been working on between drinks last night hadn’t yet been sprayed with fixative, and even if she wasn’t sure that the fumes would make her puke again, she wouldn’t have bothered. Sometime last night between the table and her bedroom, she’d stumbled and put a hand right in the middle of page, smudging the hands she shouldn’t have been drawing into a grayish splotch.

She swirled the black dust around with her index finger and tried (and failed) to swallow away the paste in her mouth.

She tried to convince herself that it was better this way, but the truth of the matter was, she knew that Roy would take her back no matter what and now that Jim had Karen (or rather Karen had Jim) she was about read to give up on this “finding herself.”

Pam got up abruptly and made it three steps towards her cell phone on the coffee table before her vision turned to TV static and she had to stand still with her arms out until her sight came back. It might have been a sign, but she wasn’t so sober yet as to lose the ability to blame it on the alcohol.

Three rings in and she was losing her nerve when his voice crackled sleepily in her ear.

“Hello?”

Pam swallowed once more but her mouth still tasted like glue and she was surprised she could get any words out at all.

“Hi.”

He perked up when he heard her voice. “Hey. You okay?”

She exhaled violently and could smell the foul on her breath.

“Come back,” she whispered.

Pam was done being evasive. “If it’s not you, it’s going to be him.”

The silence was loud and her head was pounding. “Please, Jim. Don’t let it be him.”