Almost Free on a Tender Night
By Rory Doherty
Dedham, Massachusetts—twenty minutes south of Boston. A Tuesday.
“Let’s talk about you now.” Linda exhaled a mouthful as she twirled to a point the red-hot ash of her cigarette in the overflowing ashtray she’d just moved precisely in front of her. Her eyes, red from crying, stayed caught on her hand as she cleared space enough to crush out the spent cigarette pinched in her fingers. She understood the situation, but she’d caught his glance and it lit her. Wasn’t she entitled to a fucking minute, please? They’d only just found out, definitively. But she’d known. Knew with all of them—the very next day. She drained her drink, tilting her head back to catch ice in her mouth. She used the backside of her hand to clear a drop of dribble from her chin. “Fix me another.” She handed him her glass of melted ice, her small fingers red from the cold of stirring it.
Her husband, a burly Boston cop with greying temples and a youthful smile and unflappable patience until he lost it, dropped fresh cubes from his thick fingers into her cured glass. He poured her a stout one. Winked to dial down her mood. “This one’ll set you free.”
She noticed he had not fixed himself a fresh one. “Stay with me,” she said. “Catch up.”
He snatched a fresh glass from the cabinet, poured four fingers of Smirnoff and, leaning against the countertop, knocked them back. “Feel better?”
“Almost.” She handed him her drained drink.
He fixed her up another one, this one reasonable. “Sláinte
She made short work of that one, too, her fourth. He knew he’d never catch up to her and that before long he’d have to catch hold of her, protect her from herself, make love to her until, as one, they both cried. It was going to be a tender night, again, her chasing oblivion, him staying with her. He knocked back another belt of Smirnoff, three fingers, before returning to his seat at the kitchen table and his unfreshened first drink, a screwdriver – vodka and orange juice, her standard, her potassium, she called it.
“How can committing a mortal sin not haunt you?” Linda stirred her drink with a finger, then stuck her finger in her mouth and sucked it clean, the sting of vodka mixing with the tang of juice on her tongue.
“I don’t think about it.” Smoke from her cigarette caught him. He closed an eye, rubbed it with a knuckle. “And you’ll never catch me talking about it. Why do you fixate? I was sixteen. He had it coming. Nobody speaks of it, ever.” He lifted the hem of his stretched out t-shirt over his barrel of a belly and pressed it to his tearing left eye.
She pressed: “How can you know?”
“A, most people who were there are dead by now; B, to speak of it they’d be incriminating themselves; and C, didn’t I just say I don’t like thinking about it? Why is it always that with you? I swear. Why I ever told, I don’t know. It goes against everything.” He drained his drink, chewed his ice.
“No secrets. That’s how we roll, Five-O. Unconditional honesty.” She was starting to slur. “Or is it love? That’s what we believe in, right?”
“Yeah, right, sure, but, hon, listen.” He was feeling it, too. “Here’s what I believe. Honesty is overrated. I like things to myself, but I told you, now it’s a secret, and secrets crave their own telling, which is why you’ve always got to bring it up.”
His mood was turning. She could lose him. She saw it in the tautness of his cheeks and the set of his jaw and the way his eyes shifted away from hers and did not come back. They hung on an indeterminate spot above the kitchen table as he chose his words. They did not return to catch hold of hers. It scared her almost sober. She shook her head and squinted concentration and thought she’d better watch her words, too.
“You, I, we need to forget it and don’t speak of it, ever. Lock it in a black box at the back of our brain and throw away the fucking key, lose that key forever, let it melt beyond recall into the vastness of eternity.” He went low, spoke deliberate, “Are you with me?” It was a whisper, a plead, almost.
Seven years. Six kids. Fresh one on the way. She was. And he with her. They drew close and drew in full breaths that they pushed out audibly in unison through puffed cheeks—exhaustion, resignation, and the stirring of what would grow into boundless love, hope, worry and wonderment. She rubbed his thigh. He kissed, tenderly, the top of her head as they caught up their hands. After a quiet minute they threw back their heads and drained their drinks, their eyes turned up, their thoughts turned in, their entwined fingers resting on his leg. They sucked dregs of alcohol from ice at the bottom of smudged glasses. She shook her head, again. “Wow,” she said, feeling the spin. “I’m almost free.” The glass slipped from her hand as she handed it to him. Miraculously, he caught it, empty of everything save a few, small cubes sucked smooth. He fixed her another one, a stiff one, and himself a stiff one, too, and thought about baby names, his mother’s name, Mary, and his mother’s mother’s name, Nana Maureen.
Bio: Rory Doherty’s fiction and poetry has appeared in Howth Castle, Side Show, ARTWIFE Magazine, ANTAE Journal, Bull, Northern New England Review, Firework Stories, Blessings in Disguise—Eyes Welled Up Anthology (PoetsChoice Press), The Write Launch, Hemingway Shorts, Vol.10. (2025), and Exacting Clam. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from Boston University and completed doctoral studies in Humanities (PhD ABD) at the University of Texas at Dallas. In addition to being a writer, Rory is and has been many things: son, brother, student, athlete, soldier, bartender, fighter, lover, teacher, husband, father, business owner, pet doter, planet hugger, etc. Through all past lives and including this iteration, he feels mostly like a thief hoping not to get caught.
Author’s Notes: ALMOST FREE ON A TENDER NIGHT was written as homage to F.S. Fitzgerald. I began writing the piece on April 10, 2025–the centennial anniversary of THE GREAT GATSBY. A great novel indeed, but in this humble writer’s opinion, a novel which pales in comparison to his TENDER IS THE NIGHT. (BTW – a title Fitz clipped from Keats’ poem ‘Ode to a Nightingale’). The story is a celebration of the tragic beauty of the love between Dick and Nicole Diver, Pete and Linda O’Malley. And to the multitude of dysfunctional, devoted, co-enabled, alcoholic lovers everywhere.
