The Breaking Point. Mariella Starr

it,” Faith said. “Ricco and I are going to spend the summer here in Hancock, while Ales and I work our way through our problems. When Ales returns to work, he’s going to be working a four-day week, and taking three-day weekends with us. Truthfully, he has never really stopped working. He has been working into the early morning hours, designing, and doing whatever he does at his office.”

      “Are you thinking of living here permanently?” Jill asked.

      “Someday maybe, but not now. When school resumes, I’ll be going to Frostburg, as both a teacher and a student taking post-graduate studies. The one-hundred-mile round trip was vetoed. I tried to float the idea, but Ales said absolutely not, and he said he wouldn’t be changing his mind.”

      Jill made a face. “I have to agree with him. That’s too much on anyone. I hate having to drive to Hagerstown or further.”

      Faith shrugged.

      Jill hugged Faith again. “I’m just glad you’re feeling better, and you’re working on your problems. I was worried.”

      “I’m still worried, but like you said, we’re working on it,” Faith admitted.

      “I don’t want to bring up something that is going to cause a problem, but...” Jill said hesitantly.

      “But?”

      “I went through your things in the garage,” Jill admitted. “Not everything was destroyed. It looked like it from the top of the pile, but because some of your paintings had those dropdown canvases over them, they were protected. The pieces that didn’t look to me like they’d been damaged are in Carrie’s van. I borrowed it to bring your stuff to you. A lot of your paints, and brushes, and tools weren’t damaged either. At least that I could see.”

      “Okay, let’s bring them in,” Faith said, taking a deep breath. “We can store them in the empty room and I’ll go through them.”

      “Oh, no,” Jill said, shaking her head. “I’m not going to let you tramp up and down those steps and stairs. Even getting them as far as the living room, requires doing all the steps from the sidewalk. My brother would kill me for overtaxing your strength. We’ll wait until he gets back from the grocery store with Ricco. Living here is like doing several cardio workouts every day!”

      “Cardio workouts are good for you!” Faith said, teasing her sister-in-law. Jill was thin and trim, but she hated any kind of physical exercise.

      Jill left to go home, and Ales and Ricco made trip after trip to the third floor. Even Ricco’s eight-year-old legs began to flag. He was taking box after box of carefully packed items Jill had salvaged. Ales was carrying the paintings.

      Faith scrutinized every piece of her artwork. She saw flaws that Jill’s untrained eye couldn’t see. She was admittedly a perfectionist when it came to her work.

      “You’re not destroying this one, are you?” Ales said, looking at a painting that was a landscape of a lake with a background of woodland in almost abstract strokes.

      “It’s damaged,” Faith said, and a tear ran down her cheek.

      “If it is, I can’t see where,” Ales said, looking over the piece carefully. “May I have this one for my office?”

      “Yes,” Faith whispered, and her voice alerted her husband that she was crying.

      “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Alessandro said, wrapping his arms around her. “The destruction of your work is something I can’t fix, but I can make sure it never happens again, notwithstanding a natural disaster.”

      Faith nodded and wiped her tears away again. “Your mother is a disaster. What kind of secrets are you keeping from me? I saw you in a deep conversation with Jill today?”

      “Mom? Are you okay?” Ricco appeared in the doorway.

      “Of course!”

      “Then, why are you crying?”

      “I’m a girl. Girls get emotional, and we cry,” Faith said, wiping her tears away. “It doesn’t necessarily mean anything is wrong. Girls even cry when they are happy.”

      Ricco looked from his mother to his father. He didn’t see any anger on either of their faces. “If Byron and Jayden help carry the rest of the boxes upstairs, can we go to the park and ride our bikes?”

      “If you walk your bikes to Main Street, yes,” Ales said. “As I’ve warned you, this hill is too steep to ride, and I don’t want you losing control.”

      “We all walk our bikes to the bottom,” a boy said, flanking Ricco. “The last time I tried to ride it, I lost my bike for two whole months.”

      “Good for your parents, Byron,” Ales said in agreement. “Sure, grab a box, but be careful with them. No throwing them around. Treat them like you’re carrying glass.”

      Three boys hiking two flights of stairs made quick work of the stack of small boxes. Then there was a thundering of running feet through the kitchen as they grabbed cookies and sodas and were gone with a loud slamming of the kitchen door.

      “If we could bottle that energy,” Faith said from a comfortable position on the sunroom furniture. “Now, will you tell me what is going on?”

      “My sisters and their husbands have been on a mission,” Ales admitted. “One of Mom’s neighbors complained to Jill that Mom was throwing liquor bottles in her trash, and in her other neighbor’s trash. The neighbors want it stopped. Mom denied the claim, so Jill and Carrie have taken their investigations a step further. They have been going over when Mom wasn’t home, and they have been going through her trash. The empty bottles are there, and there have been plenty of them. They have been stuffed into paper bags, empty boxes, and a variety of things to disguise them. They are collecting them as proof.

      “I know it sounds terrible invading Mom’s privacy, but it’s not breaking in if you have a key, and we all have keys to Mom’s house, and we need to learn the truth.”

      “Is that why she’s been so unstable and acting crazy?” Faith asked.

      “We don’t know for sure yet, but we think alcohol is the culprit,” Ales said. “By the way, her horrible debilitating injury has already healed, and she’s walking around without a boot, crutch, or a cane.

      “Mack and John have been doing vehicle surveillance, and following her from liquor store to liquor store. John followed her to Frostburg, where she bought four cases at a discount liquor store. He filmed her on his phone. Even at a discount price, it was two hundred and forty dollars a case.”

      “There is an amazing amount of alcohol hidden in her house. By the number of bottles they’ve been finding in her trash, the estimate is that she is spending over sixty dollars a day on booze. Her poison is Jose Cuervo Tequila, the gold label.”

      “Last Christmas when I bought a bottle for our party, it was thirty-two dollars,” Faith said, and she snapped her fingers. “That explains the half bottle that disappeared.”

      Faith furrowed her eyebrows together, trying to do the math, and Ales smiled. Even simple math was his wife’s weakness. “That’s roughly two thousand dollars a month,” he said.”

      “We’ve been contributing to that,” Faith exclaimed angrily, getting to her feet. Your mother said she couldn’t make her expenses because your father’s pension had been cut by his union! We’ve been contributing to her drinking! How many drinks are in a bottle?”

      “I don’t know, and I guess it depends on the size of the bottle and the glass,” Ales said. “We all know mom has been drinking more as she gets older. Now, we suspect she might have become dependent on it.

      “Carrie is talking with a woman from a recovery center, getting advice from her on how to handle the situation. We’ve decided to hold an intervention, and we’ll see where we go from there.”

      “It explains a lot,”