Rewritten.

If you'd like to know why exactly I'm rewriting the first few chapters of The Next Second Chance, please take a look at the Works in progress. page up on that silver bar.

Monday, November 5, 1984

Cooled herbal tea sat on top of the ugly, out-of-tune upright piano against the wall, as forgotten as the TV from which Monday afternoon cartoons blared. A warm light glowed over the piano in the gray of the small, leaky apartment, illuminating the words, melodies, notes and chords on the wrinkly, thin paper Candace had pressed between the front of the piano and her palm to write easier. Her dark hair had been thrown into a sloppy bun as a result of the distraction her guitar, before set on the piano bench, served from the tea she had prepared an hour before, and she still wore the black sweats and gray truck stop t-shirt she had fallen asleep in early the morning before.

But she didn’t mind the forgotten tea. She didn’t even like tea. She made it because it kept her hands busy. She drank it because it was the most hardcore drink she was allowed to consume anymore.

With a glance at the glass bowl on top of the piano next to a green candle and a framed photo of her and her twin brother at age three that held the six chips she had collected from AA meetings, she sighed and set down her pen. She rubbed her chilly hands together and pressed them between her knees with her head back. She knew by heart that the bowl contained a white chip for her first day sober, an orange one for thirty days, a red for ninety, a yellow for six months, a green for nine and a blue for one year of sobriety.

The chips had been optional. At the end of her first AA meeting in 1982 at a San Francisco rehab center, she had felt that she needed to take one. She had already checked herself into the center at the young age of eighteen, pleading with her body to please get better so she wouldn’t be able to join her loved ones in the next life before her time; she knew if she didn’t keep a chip, she wouldn’t have a sense of accomplishment and, in turn, wouldn’t stop drinking once she left the center, no matter how badly she wanted to.

So she had taken the first white chip, tucked it into the pocket of the khakis the center had given her and returned the next week. And the next week. The meetings at the center continued for six weeks--she got her thirty days chip the day before she was released--and then she moved into an apartment not far from the center to continue attending the meetings for another month before she moved to Seattle with two outfits, one pair of weathered black combat boots, a blonde Taylor acoustic she had refused to sell even after she sold everything else she owned and three chips colored white, orange and red, where she continued to attend meetings for ten more months.

“. . . five o’clock news is on next,” a woman announced on the TV, startling her out of the few, less-than-pleasant memories she still held onto. “Stay tuned.”

- The Next Second Chance, Chapter 1