Promises promises

Here's installment 10 of Wasted Miracles.

Where Herbie was was a mystery; he’d never simply not shown up and she was a little bit worried. Some of his friends were not exactly top grade and there were people who simply did not like him, he’d told her.
At one-thirty, Johnny had agreed to drive her back to the Park Plaza and wait for her while she banged on Herbie’s door again, same results. And the phone was still busy, he must have left it off the hook. So Johnny had driven her home, a nice gesture since it was miles out of his way. But he shrugged it off, said he liked to see where straight rich white people lived. On the way there, he told her he was going to be celebrating five years in the program but still missed the booze, which he had always liked better than anything else, though he’d done everything to his body that one man could do in a lifetime. When she answered that her first anniversary was coming up, he stopped the car right in the middle of Idylwood Road and gave her a big hug. That made her feel better, though not much. Since she was getting two chips, she said, she thought she might make earrings out of them, but Johnny had a better idea.
“What you do, honey, is keep those things in your bag and whenever you want a drink or snort, stick one of them under your tongue. When the thing melts, then you can go back out, get drunk, get stoned, get laid, whatever.”
She’d heard the line before but laughed dutifully.
To top it all off, her mother was waiting up for her, like she was some highschool kid. Josie wondered why she’d ended up in such a fucked up family, she must have been switched at birth. She climbed into her bed, read a few minutes of Ann Rice, fell asleep with the iPod headphones on her head listening to Smashing Pumpkins and rehearsing the scene she’d make to Herbie the next day. The asshole