The mail just came. I’m holding a camping and outdoors catalogue in my hand. It’s addressed to a dead man. I pause for a moment and look at that name.
     Tracy used to date a former secretary here. He and she had a few things delivered here, and so we still sometimes get mail addressed to him. He was charming, bright, loving -- our secretary's dream man except for one thing: he was an alcoholic.
     It took her a while to realize that. Oh, she knew he drank a lot and was most comfortable with a drink in his hand, but he was funny and attentive to her. Surely he couldn’t be an alcoholic.
     I don’t remember exactly what happened, but something opened her eyes. She told him that he had to join AA or they were done. He said he would and joined her in dumping out all the liquor in his house. He told her that he wanted to attend the meetings alone because he was embarrassed. And he talked the talk and walked the walk for a while, or so it seemed. Until she found vodka hidden in his underwear drawer. She then found out that he hadn't attended the meetings.
     He tried to convince her that he could handle it. That it was okay for him to have a drink once in a while. That he could control it. And it seemed like he was controlling it, but her instincts told her the truth. She told him that it was like a man who was saying it was okay for part of his body – his hand, for instance – to be on fire because, after all, it wasn’t his whole body that was engulfed.
     She grew away from him rapidly. He kept trying to win her back, kept making promises that he wouldn’t keep. Finally he showed up drunk at her house and embarrassed her in front of her sister. She called his dad to pick him up. There was a scuffle and the police got called. That was the end of it.
     "I realized that he loved to drink more than he loved me," she told me. "And he didn't want to change."
     He pursued her some more, but she had gone on and she wasn’t going back. She cared too much about her life to throw it away. She finally moved to a new town for a new job and a new, better life. I still had business with him, but he stopped making payments, and the account closed.
     One afternoon as I was driving home from work. I saw him walking by the side of the road. He wasn’t quite staggering, but he was weaving. I stopped, rolled down my window and asked if he needed a ride home. He said sure, stepped next to my car and then threw up on the hood. I closed my eyes and waited. Eventually he got in the car, apologizing, his voice so slurred that I couldn’t understand most of what he said. Beer doesn’t smell that great in the bottle, much less after it’s been thrown up. I dropped him at his apartment and then went to the car wash. It was weeks before the odor went completely away.
     I lost track of Tracy for a while after that. During that time, he got arrested for drunk driving, driving without a license and few other things. He was ordered into a treatment program and seemed to do well on it. He dropped by my office to ask if I ever heard from my former secretary. I said I did and she was doing well. He didn’t ask for her number, and I didn’t offer it. (I found out later that he had called her anyway, but she had found someone else now.) He’d grown a beard, lost some weight, looked good if a bit strained. He got a job. Built a new life. Was dating again. It seemed like things were finally working out, but somewhere in there, he decided that his life was better with a drink.
     This time he dived into the bottle and didn’t come back out. People began to notice him staggering down the sidewalks. The few friends he had left attempted to intervene, but he fought them. He lost his job, his license again, went through another treatment program, appeared before two different judges, got counseling from various pastors and ministers. Everyone kept throwing him ropes, but he kept swimming away.
     The summer before he died, I stopped at an intersection and saw him walking home. He was clutching a bag with a local liquor store’s logo on it. He could barely walk. I watched him until the car behind me honked its horn, and then I went on.
     Two months later, I got a call from a lady who had been appointed by the court to settle his affairs. Tracy was dead and buried. She had found an old bill and wanted to know if he still owed us money. I told her that the amount had been written off months ago. She told me that she was a neighbor and about how Tracy kept showing up at their house drunk and crying. Her husband had to take him home and put him in bed. They tried to get him help, but Tracy wouldn’t cooperate, wouldn’t enter any program. When Tracy didn’t come around for a few days, they were relieved. But when a week passed, her husband walked across the street. The door was unlocked. A foul smell hung in the air. He went in. Tracy was lying on the floor in the living room.
     The police investigated. The autopsy revealed he had choked on his own vomit. Tracy’s father was dead by this time, his mother in a nursing home and so far gone that she didn’t even remember having a son. The neighbors buried him. There was no obituary in the paper. They were the only ones who attended.
     I think about the terrible waste of a life for a moment, then the phone rings. I drop the catalogue in the trash and answer the call.

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