How Soft the Night How Clear the Song

Tom Kelly pushed aside the drape covering his hotel room window and gazed out at the dark courtyard below. The underwater lights in the pool cast a wavy blue-green glow across the edges of the landscaping. Thin wisps of white mist rose from the surface of the water as though it were warmer than the cool night air. As he stared out the window, his eye caught a flicker of movement, a dark shape floating across the bottom of pool. His own reflection stared back at him in the glass, the shape resembling a shadow crossing his face. He let the curtain drop.

Tom was a man in his late fifties, wearing a suit coat that was five years out of date and a button-down oxford shirt too tight across a rounded gut. At least the whole ensemble was clean, thanks to the hotel’s laundry and dry cleaning service. His face had the florid flush and reddened nose associated with a man who liked his alcohol neat. He took off the jacket and folded it across the chair next to the bed as he sank down onto the mattress. He had trouble sleeping, but the bottle of rye whiskey on the night stand should help with that.

The buzz of his mobile phone woke him the next day as it rattled across the nightstand.

“When will the car be ready?” Tom’s wife, Carol spoke in clipped tones.

“Next week sometime, they said parts are on order.” The car in question, a late model Ford sedan, was in the shop after Tom slammed it into a tree half a mile from their house at the tail end of a white rock road. He woke up to bruised ribs and a blinding headache the next day after walking home from the wreck. It was the last night he spent in their house, the last straw, according to Carol.

“You could have killed someone, or yourself,” she said.

He wasn’t a drunk, an alcoholic like those folks at the meetings. The woman in too tight stretch pants and flip flops who had her toddler blow into the breathalyzer so she could drive home from a party, or the rheumy eyed old man celebrating his first year of sobriety. He was a social drinker. The mixed drinks at lunch with clients, the beer on the golf course, and the shot on the way home from work, he just needed to cut back.

The next night, back in his hotel room after work and a fast food dinner, Tom paced the five feet…

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