She gave me a look. “I read up on these pills. Nasty stuff. You get hooked, even if you follow all the rules. Then you get angry. You start lying. Your whole personality changes.”
“I know,” I said, nodding. We’d had to study it all for paramedic certification. She wasn’t wrong. “Even people who know better get addicted.”
She nodded, like wasn’t it a shame, but I suddenly found myself sitting very still—looking straight ahead at the answer to a question I didn’t even know I was asking.Even people who knew better got addicted.
Maybe DeStasio was addicted to painkillers.
It wasn’t all that uncommon with firefighters, given all their on-the-job injuries. DeStasio’s back pain was legendary—and so was his abilityto endure it. Add to that the loss of his son, his problem drinking, his wife leaving—and the pieces seemed to fit together. Possibly.
I felt a strange twinge of worry. Not that DeStasio deserved it.
“It just hit me, right now, that DeStasio might be addicted to painkillers,” I said then, out loud.
My mom looked over. “Why?”
I walked her through my thinking.
“That’s a pretty good list,” she said.
“Maybe I should go check on him this afternoon,” I said.
“You want to go check on the guy who stalked you, lied about you, and ended your career?” she said.
“I’d been planning to go over there anyway,” I said, nodding at the turn of events. “But the plan was to yell at him.”
“Maybe you could bring him some soup instead.”
Safe to say, I had a lot of mixed emotions toward DeStasio at that moment. But I knew him too well to just decide he was evil and leave it at that. It was unequivocally not okay that he was taking it all out on me, but I could know that and also know that he was in pain. Both could be true at the same time.
I wasn’t sure if he deserved my compassion, but I did know I wanted to be the kind of person who would offer it. It’s not the easy moments that define who we are. It’s the hard ones.
DeStasio was clearly at the end of his rope. The addiction, the losses. There was nothing left of his life but smoldering rubble. I tried to imagine being him—being in that situation—and then having somebody like me show up at the department to break apart the last bricks in the foundation.
In his shoes, I might have made some bad choices, too.
Though probably notthatbad.
“I think,” I said carefully, “that I’ve got a workable plan. First I’ll go over and punch him in the jaw. Then I’ll force him to stand face-to-face with his cruel, stupid behavior and hold him accountable. Then I’ll give him some homemade soup. Just to cover all the bases.”
“You’re forgetting something,” Diana said.
I glanced over and shook my head.
“What are you going to do after you yell at him—before you give him the soup?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I think you do know,” Diana said, setting her little bird on the dashboard. Then she reached over, put a hand on mine, and said, “You’re going to forgive him.”
I shook my head. “I’m still bad at forgiveness,” I said.
“Well, then,” she said. “This is a great chance to practice.”
Twenty-eight
DESTASIO DID NOTanswer his door.
I stood on his porch with a massive thermos of beef-and-vegetable soup on my hip, and I knocked and knocked.
