Distinctly Montana Magazine

w w w . d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m 55 For three hours, her roommate, Frankie, drives and talks: couloirs she's skied, ski bums she's boned, a free heli-skiing trip she'd lucked into where all she paid for in ten days was an $80 T-shirt. "Skiing's the reason I've been able to avoid drinking for a whole year," she keeps saying. Three hours of this. Steve had given them tickets to Montana's only summer ski hill, which happened to be in Wyoming. Frankie hauls ass around a hair- pin turn as her old four-cylinder Tacoma shudders up the mountain. Kate and Frankie are not really friends. They live in Steve's house rent-free, along with an ever-revolving handful of other troubled souls. Frankie has lived there for a whole year; Kate, for three months. They go to all the same AA meetings, eat vegan-buttered toast with Marmite every morning at the same kitchen island, and watch the same TV show, Smothered, about too-close relationships between mothers and their kids every night aft er work. Neither Kate nor Frankie has not spoken with her mother in ten years. Frankie, who wants to be an addiction therapist, calls out advice to Sunhe and what's-her-name, a mother-daughter combo who spoon in bed and occasionally share bathwater, though Kate figures the show probably exaggerates this—"Enmeshed!" Frankie hoots, or "Get a room!" Kate can imagine her going on and on to future patients—poor people Kate imagines might return to crystal meth just to prove to this woman how horrible she is at her job. "Whatcha writing?" Frankie says. "Gratitude journal." Kate has been grinding away at this sad, polka-dotted spiralbound for a week. It's supposed to make her into a more positive person. "I used to do one of those," Frankie says. "Doesn't work." Kate sighs. She has written: Steve, three months sober, fishing, and skiing in July. Behemoth mountains rise on either side, giant mountains like messages the earth is sending to Kate: don't drink. Frankie careens around the last turns and pulls into the windy dirt parking lot. The real reason for the trip: Frankie needs to move out. "Tell her we need our space," Steve had said. "Why don't you tell her we're hooking up?" Kate had asked. "It's your house." But this was the one thing he'd asked her to do. He was overwhelmed at work, and Kate needed to practice setting boundaries anyway. He could work on setting his when he had more mental space. A long-haired patroller asks them if they've used a Poma lift before. "You get hurt here, it's a helicopter ride," he says. "Sure," Kate says. "How hard can it be?" The patroller frowns. "Everyone's an expert, huh! Guess you don't need me. You mess up, you'll save yourself, is that it? You got a med kit hidden in those shorts?" "Give it a rest," says Kate. "You used a Poma before? Yes or no?" "First time," says Frankie. So, he gives them the spiel: grab the bar, secure the disc between your legs. "…and if you eff up, just let go. Don't try to hang on." "You know a patroller named Grace Scaggs?" Frankie says. "Nope," he says. Frankie rolls her eyes. "We'll find her," she says, as though Kate's worried. At the hardwood flooring company, Kate works with people like this patroller, people with tattooed skulls like his smiling malig- nantly from their necks, people like Kate and Frankie, whose whole lives waver between let go and hang on. Steve didn't understand this. He didn't really get how being sober wasn't just guzzling mocktails and belonging to a new club. Steve didn't need to drink or smoke or anything. His addiction seemed to involve helping people, and he took more and more lost souls on, people who clogged his O N THE DAY OF THE WRECK, KATE ENDURES THE EARLY-MORNING CONVERSATION BY FIXATING ON STUFF SHE WOULDN'T NOR- MALLY NOTICE: wind blowing the grass so that each piece of it snags the morning light; tiny birds going cheeseburger, cheeseburger; deer picking their way across the road before people head to work. by MARIA ANDERSON THE WRECK LITERARY LODE LITERARY LODE Behemoth mountains rise on either side, giant mountains like messages the earth is sending to Kate: don't drink.

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