Halfway - Hannah Karim
John and I descend the steps of the old church stairs. As we open the basement door, the familiar scent of mildew greets us. In the past, we’d attempted suppressing the scent with various candles and room fresheners, but nothing worked. We stopped trying, deciding it best not to deny our circumstance anyways. We had arranged the seats to face each other in a circle, a configuration made for AA meetings, group therapy, and our book club meetings, held on Tuesday evenings underneath the Madison Street Church. Posters advertising our book club were hung around our town’s library, diner, and convenience stores. Locals joked that we facilitated a halfway house more than we did a literary discussion, but we didn’t mind. To us, it was home.
An anonymous donor from the community provided the funding needed to supply each of our members with a copy of the book we were reading. We read a book a month and as our membership expanded, we could only afford second hand copies. Sam expressed increased comfortability with writing in the margins of something already worn down. Heather inspired an admiration for the handwritten notes that were sometimes found on the title pages. And it wasn’t long before everyone was writing their own with intent of giving the book away after reading it.
Harold was our first member and our next door neighbor in the first apartment that John and I rented together. He used to tell us we were too young to know what love is. If John and I were to ask him about it now, he’d claim he supported us from the start. Harold liked books and loved having an audience. He liked telling people that he was a soulful jazz singer in another life, convinced he’d been reincarnated as a male Billie Holiday.
We missed the presence of Gertrude, an 80 year-old woman, who frequently talked about her past as a substitute for her inability to live as she once had. She was a regular at our meetings for years until she wasn’t. She slept frequently, saying today was an “I can’t get out of bed type of day” and that she would try tomorrow. When life got too heavy, my mother stepped outside to smoke a cigarette. Tomorrow was Gertrude’s cigarette. Despite the proven emptiness of such a promise, Gertrude called every morning at 8 a.m. and every morning, John and I listened. We felt for her, John and I, never pretending our own debilitation was less than inevitable.
Caroline was the embodiment of honey and men knew it. Her door seemed ever-revolving, always welcoming the next man eager to release himself in her. I worried for her, though John assured me this was natural for people in their twenties, that she was in the process of finding herself. John became less convinced as the years went on. He never admitted it though, even after we were having Caroline over every Sunday night for dinner and sending her home with a week’s worth of groceries. John and I had noticed that the bruising on her arm only became more frequent, but we pretended not to, afraid of scaring her off.
The meetings themselves often ran for around two hours. We always began with discussing Fitzgerald and Orwell and Baldwin and Tolstoy. But it was never long before Clara discussed her mother’s latest disappointment with her or Camille shared the latest impulsive purchase that she was hiding from her girlfriend or Patrick asked for advice to stay clean or Steven expressed sadness that his cat, Sisyphus was ignoring him. A few minutes before the meeting’s conclusion, Patrick mentioned something about a crazy disease spreading on the other side of the world. We didn’t think anything of it.