The antidepressants the Kirkbride doctors had given him had done some good. He had stopped drinking, thrown away the beer in the refrigerator, carried the Bacardi rum out of the basement.
Martinez had begun to realize what could happen if he didn't get his life back on track. Even more than when he was in Iraq, he saw just how fragile life is.
"I started to get afraid to die," he said. "Who is going to support my wife? Who is going to support my child?"
After many years of absence, he started going to church again.
The first time he attended the Iglesia Evangelica el Refujio, in a small blue-and-white building in an industrial area of North Third Street, the Spanish-speaking congregants seemed to stare at him as if he didn't belong.
But that was coming from within him, he saw, not from them. On his second visit, when the pastor called to the altar those who wanted to commit their lives to Christ, Martinez stepped forward.
