The White Flag Group meeting: the dapper skeptic who listens

texture · 8 Nov YDAU

• When: 8 November YDAU (a White Flag Group AA meeting at the Provident)
• What: At the meeting's raffle-break, Ewell appears in full class-plumage — "a blue suit and laser chronometer and tiny shoes whose shine you could read by" — sharing an ashtray with Nell Gunther (his fork-assailant of event 4) and making "a bit of a hostile show" of not entering the conversation, "which is his choice and on him alone." His chosen Home Group is elsewhere named as Wednesday night's Better Late Than Never Group at St. Elizabeth's (scene 056). Yet the same meeting shows the crack beneath the fastidiousness: during the harrowing testimony of the freebasing mother and her faceless stillborn, "even Tiny Ewell and Kate Gompert and the rest of the worst of them all sat still and listened without blinking, looking not just at the speaker's face but into it."