ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: Searching

Book Two, Chapter Seven: At the Kitchen Table

Joshua returns from his errand before I finish my bath.

I dress in a black turtleneck and dark corduroys. He’s back in the dinette chair. The chrome table and chairs belong to him. When he settles somewhere that feels like home to him, he’ll retrieve them.

“Will you go with me to a Twelve-Step meeting?” I ask. “There’s one tonight at five-thirty. It’s a small group, my favorite. There’s another meeting at eight, a men’s group.”

“We’ll do the five-thirty,” he says.

I take a seat across from him. “Do you think we’ll ever stop being defensive with each other?”

“What do you want me to say? You want me to cry? Talk about the old girlfriends who say they still love me?”

“Which old girlfriends?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

I wish I knew what to say to Joshua. What would Ernie say? How would Ernie comfort him?

“My life is in California. Christy and I can’t live together, and working with her is a bitch, too. I won’t work with her ever again. I know where I want to live. I’ll live by myself.”

“Where do you want to live?”

“In Burbank. I like Burbank.”

He and Christy shared an apartment on Hollywood Way in Burbank. In the middle of a summer night, their Russian blue cat was killed as he tried to cross that milti-lane highway. When Joshua realized Bugger was never going to come home again, he gathered wisps of gray fur from rug and pillows so he could still touch Bugger.

I long to touch Joshua, but he won’t let me. Maybe I don’t deserve that privilege. If I don’t know how to talk with him, why would he allow me to touch him?