I do not own "Warrior." It belongs to director Gavin O'Connor. Showed "Warrior" to my father, who said, "I doubt Sylvester Stallone would make it through a round with Tommy." Also, I'm very sorry I wrote him with the wrong shoulder being dislocated.

On another note, thank you to everyone out there reading this, submitting reviews, or just letting me know that there are people enjoying this story. I really appreciate it.

Chapter Eight: (Un)Happy Anniversary

This morning Jane can barely stand to look at the appliances in her kitchen, the coffee maker her dad had gotten her while wistfully telling her to enjoy her ability to digest coffee on an empty stomach while she was young, the cutting board, the tea kettle, stuff she had bought with the gift card he'd given her for Christmas.

Her father died one year ago today. Emphysema. He'd been going on seventy-one, and with his prematurely aging features, had almost always been mistaken for her grandfather. His death had been, as people had tactlessly put it, "for the best." They were right, if incredibly insensitive; a divorced, lonely depressed man in his seventies using an oxygen tank, hacking up all the crap he's been smoking since he was thirteen and popping Valium like M&Ms probably wasn't interested in prolonging such an existence anyway.

They hadn't been close; sure, he'd gotten custody when her parents divorced, but two depressed and not altogether physically healthy people who avoided interacting if they could help it could only develop so much of a bond. Still, he'd set an example. With all the different varieties of alcohol, all the fun drugs to try, she'd never picked up cigarettes. Never felt the temptation.

But he wasn't a monster. He'd only ever hit her once, for going into his Valium stash; they kept their distance, which had been fine with her. Had been her preference, really. When lost in their own little worlds it was easier for both of them into their respective downward spirals without interference from either party. He had been there when he was, well, in the same world and not out in la-la land. He was financially stable; he stayed with his head in the clear when working, so he had a steady job; he and her mother could tolerate each other enough a few years after the divorce that when it came time to get their crazy bad-seed teenage daughter institutionalized, he was more than willing to pay his share for treatment. Not like he could really choose, though. Mom had ripped his head off over Jane's suicide attempt. Had demanded to know why he didn't get her help sooner, tell her things were so bad. If he'd been paying more attention, he'd have put her ass in rehab earlier.

"You were there," she says to herself, watching the drip from the coffee maker. "You were unpleasant and unhappy and judgmental, but you were there. And you tried your best." He really had. And with a child like her it had been one hell of an effort.

Her father's dead and buried in D.C. She's not sure what she would say to him if she could reach his grave, let alone if she was the type of person who talks to tombstones as if the people beneath could hear and respond.

"I'm sorry I was such a disappointment for you"?

"I was a shitty daughter, but I have to admit, you really weren't meant for parenthood"?

"What made you become hell-bent on me getting help for my addiction when you never came close to kicking yours?"?

"I barely graduated high school and had to go to a psychiatric ward and then rehab but I'm not drinking or using anymore, so are you proud of me?"?

"How did you live to your seventies with the way you lived? How were you able to hang on to existence without real life?"?

"You were, in spite of everything, a good man"? Yes, perhaps the last one.

She hears a buzz on her end and answers it.

"Hello?"

It's Tommy. "You want to go for a walk?" he asks.

For a moment she's tempted to say she's sick, to wait for him to leave so she can steep in this…depression, this slowly building resentment. Then again, if she starts on this trek she'll just go in deeper. It's unseasonably warm out and a walk might just clear her head. It's not yet noon; they both have the time before work. And Tommy is…he's the present. He pulls her out of that loop, those memories of her teen years. He's not exactly a cheery fellow, but she knows she'll feel better walking with him.

"Yeah, sure. I'll be right down."

F

Jane seems distracted by something, lost somehow. Tommy's not that good at reading into emotions, but he can tell something's wrong. She's not like this. So he asks her, "What's up?"

"Was I spacing out?" she says. "I'm sorry, I don't want to get emotional on you or anything." He waits, watching her as they walk. "Um, I'm just…it's just that today's the one-year anniversary of…the day my dad died."

He blinks. She's lost a parent too? He can't help it. He asks, "What happened?"

"It was emphysema. He had it really bad. It's a wonder of science he made it to seventy."

"Seventy?"

Jane shrugs. "I had older parents. My mother's sixty-two, my father was seventy."

"Were you close?" It's not a question he likes, and he wishes he could take back the words as they leave his mouth, what with the look on her face when he asks.

"No," she says, voice empty, "We weren't." She takes a breath. She looks down, as if she's talking to the sidewalk. "He got custody when my parents divorced, because he kept the townhouse in Dupont Circle and most of the money and my mom had to find a place in Southeast in a neighborhood no kid should grow up in. I wasn't…" she stops, starts, hesitates. She glances his way, nervous and agitated. "I wasn't an easy child to raise. I just got worse as a teenager. He wasn't abusive or anything, we just…we didn't really like each other at all. We stayed out of each other's way. We didn't talk if we could help it. He knew I was failing half my classes and I knew his health was getting worse. He, um…" she lets out a shaky breath. "He started using an oxygen tank when I was, like, sixteen." She looks over at him again. "But we never talked about it."

Kind of like his current situation with Pop. They've talked about his situation as a deserter. He kind of told the truth, kind of lied about the relapse in Atlantic City. They don't talk about anything else. Because the old man's doing all right as far as he can tell and the house feels so far from his he'd gladly pay rent to let him know that it's not home anymore. "I know the feeling," he tells her.

Now she looks at him, waiting. Shit, there's so much he doesn't want to tell her. Some he knows he should, because he knows this is going somewhere. He wants it to, and they all say honesty is key to a healthy relationship. He thinks it over, tries to phrase it in such a way to avoid having to tell the whole story all at once. It's a long one, and he's just not up to it. "I lost my mom when I was sixteen," he says.

Her eyes widen. "Oh, god, I'm so sorry."

He stops for a moment, forces himself to keep going. "What are you sorry about?"

"I just, I mean, it's one thing to lose a parent when you're an adult; I was already living in Pittsburgh when he died, but when you're still a kid, that's got to be much worse."

He nods, more to himself than to her. He doesn't talk about his mother. He told the old man about it because he wanted to hurt him, wanted him to understand the life he took by driving them away. But Jane? She doesn't need to hear any of it, not while she's thinking about her own dead parent.

"May I ask what it was that…" she trails off.

He says it for her. "That killed her?" He starts walking faster, and she tries to keep up. "Cancer. That, and just, she lived a hard life." A very hard life. He could never understand why she hadn't left earlier, had stayed with that old drunk who treated her like a goddamn punching bag for as long as she did. It couldn't have been love; who could love a guy like that? Fear? Maybe she thought that as long as she had a warm roof over her head, insurance and her family all together, unhappy as they were, it would be enough. In time, though, she'd decided that she'd rather leave the house with her boys and never come back, left open to the elements, than stay with a ticking time bomb, left open to his rage. But then she got sick. And it meant fuckall, because no matter what happened to her, they couldn't go back.

"What…what was she like?" He looks over at her. She's testing her luck. He doesn't want to talk about it. But then he just exhales, doesn't stop walking.

"She was a good mother. She did everything she could to make sure we were okay." He doesn't explain "we." He doesn't want to get into it. And she stops questioning him. Shit, this isn't how he wanted it to turn out when he wanted to go for a walk with her. He tries to backtrack, asks, "You doin' okay?"

"Yeah." She's not really looking at him. She's wound tight, and he doesn't know what to say that can help her. He hesitates before reaching out and taking her hand. She squeezes his. Her hands are so goddamn cold, but they stay together, her hand in his for the rest of the walk. He thinks it means more than words right now. He doesn't know how much time passes by the time they head back, just that their hands touching starts to feel natural.

She's the one who breaks the silence. "Thanks for this," she says. "I needed to get out, walk around a bit. I'd felt like hiding out, just lying in bed, but this is better."

They near her apartment and he'd like to kiss her but this isn't the time for it. She probably wouldn't want him to anyway. He kind of wishes he'd come by a different day, avoided all this. But like she said, she needed this. And he has Saturday to do something they'd both like. He also knows he's not gonna try to sort out plans with her right now. There'll be another time. Tomorrow, maybe.

E

The next day she's at a morning step meeting. They're going over step eight: "We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all." And she speaks up for the first time since her first year mark. She talks about her father.

"Hi, my name is Jane and I'm an alcoholic and addict."

"Hi, Jane."

"Um, I thought about this step a lot in the past couple of days. My dad died one year ago yesterday of emphysema. I managed to get help, got sent to one of the best rehab centers covered by our insurance, but his own addiction took his life. No one ever did an intervention for him. And there were other things that he used, pills that only the two of us knew about. There were things I did I know he knew about. The drinking, the using, he knew, but we were too separate, too far apart to talk about it. I hated him when he even tried. We could've helped each other. In that house…it just felt like we were both just waiting to die. He tried to help at first, but you only last so long, you know?" she gives a nervous laugh. "It hurt him. I know it did, watching his only child getting wasted and failing school and not letting him in because who the hell was he to talk to me about addiction?

"I didn't…I didn't cry at his funeral." She rubs her arms, looks at the floor. "I figure that's another strike against me. Another thing that would've hurt him." She sniffs, her throat feels like it's closing up. Someone sensing a breakdown reaches for a box of tissues to pass to her. She waves it away. "It's okay," she says. And she doesn't cry. She hasn't cried at a meeting yet, doubts she will. "And yesterday morning, all I could think about was what a horrible child I'd been. I come from a big family on both sides and he was the oldest child and all the siblings judge each other based on the achievements of their children. All of them. And there was my dad, old, divorced, unhealthy, whose only kid was a train wreck who was never going to go anywhere. I was an embarrassment to him, and to my mother. It made me wonder, I'm not in any danger of being a success, but I'm sober, so would he be proud of that? I'm taking care of myself, I have a steady job, in waitressing, not law or medicine, but would he be proud of that?" Her time's up. She falls back against her seat, crosses her arms tighter. "Thanks for letting me share."

"Thanks for sharing."

Dionne gives her a ride home from the meeting. In the car Jane says, "I'd wanted to curl up in a ball yesterday, call in sick and sleep until the next day. But while I was thinking about it Tommy was passing by, had time to kill before work and asked if I wanted to go for a walk."

"How'd that go?"

"I mentioned my dad. He mentioned his mom died of cancer when he was sixteen."

"Have you told him about your addiction yet?" she asks, making a turn.

"No."

"You should let him know in the near future. Alcohol is a very social substance. He probably thinks that since you're twenty-one you probably see going to bars as something fun and new. And if he doesn't know you're in recovery, he'll think nothing of taking you to a bar." She shakes her head. "I don't care how many Shirley Temples you can get at a bar; you go into a barbershop you can expect to get a haircut. You gotta stay away from bars and clubs. And if you want a relationship with him, your addiction is a part of who you are. It would be an insult to the both of you to keep it a secret from him."

"I know. It's just that I haven't really found the right time to tell him."

"There isn't a right time. You make the time." She gives Jane a 'Don't bullshit me' tough-love look that reminds her all over again why she chose Dionne as her sponsor in the first place. "You've told friends that you're a recovering alcoholic, right?"

"Right."

"They took it pretty well, did they not? Didn't judge you, stop talking to you, or try to set you on fire, right?"

"Right." Indeed, neither Carlos nor Michael or the few waitresses with whom she has a friendly rapport treated her poorly after she told them. They just stopped inviting her to join them for after-work cocktails.

"Don't be afraid. Tell him."

Jane nods. "Yeah. I will."

A

During work, Courtney stops Jane as she enters a family of four's entrée orders into her section's system.

"Is your boyfriend a boxer or something?"

She looks up, not sure which part of that question to correct first. "Boyfriend" doesn't sound right. She hasn't been dating Tommy for very long, he doesn't belong to her, and he is by no means a boy. Instead of correcting her, though, she just says, "No."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure." She taps in the order code and Courtney stops her again.

"I just saw him on T.V. recently. I mean, I could've sworn it was him. You don't forget a face like that."

"Agreed, but I don't see why he'd be on T.V. He works at a gym near my apartment."

"Well, I was just wondering," and she passes through to the kitchen.

Jane shakes her head. Sure, the man can throw one hell of a punch, but a boxer? A boxer doing televised matches? That's just fuckin' nuts.