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“You don’t have to agree so fast.”

That’s it.

Four years of me turning it into something about myself, and the answer is financial aid.

She’s quiet for a while.

“Why did you come to my door on Halloween?”

I look at the dog on the screen.

“You ignored me,” I say.

She turns her head and looks at me.

“That sounds bad,” I say.

“It is bad.”

“I wasn’t used to it.”

She looks at me for a long time. Then she looks back at the TV, and she doesn’t say anything else about it, and I don’t either.

The clock says two-fifteen.

She’s slowing down. Her sentences are getting longer in the middle, with more space in them. She’s sunk down into the corner of the couch with the blanket up to her chin, and her eyes are taking longer to come back up every time she blinks.

“You’re tired,” I say.

“I’m not tired.”

I don’t argue. I turn the TV down until it’s barely there.

She keeps talking. So I keep talking. I don’t know if she wants to stay up or if she just doesn’t want the room to get quiet. It doesn’t matter. I can keep my voice going.

I tell her about the hotel in Massachusetts, where the heat in our room only had two settings, off and the surface of the sun, and Kennebeck slept on top of the covers in his socks with the window open, and Barnes called the front desk at two in the morning to complain about it and then fell asleep on hold.

“Would you have called the front desk?” I ask her. “Or just opened the window like Kennebeck?”

She doesn’t answer.

I look over.

She’s asleep.

Not pretty. Her head has tipped back into the corner of the couch at an angle that’s going to hurt her neck tomorrow. The blanket is crooked, with one gray sock sticking out the bottom. One hand is tucked under her cheek, the one without the bite on it. Her mouth is a little open. She’s breathing slow and even, and it still catches at the top every time, where her throat is hurt.

I sit there and look at her for a long time.

I don’t touch her. I don’t fix the blanket. I don’t move.

I turn the TV down the rest of the way.

She fell asleep while I was still here.

17

You Just Don’t Do It Again