"What do you need? Tell me in order."
She told him in order. It was, he thought, exactly like listening to her daughter. Meter, from the counter by the toaster, the black zipper case. The cooler. A glass of water, small sips, and the ginger ale in the door of the fridge if there was any left. The ketone strips, the little brown bottle by the meter. He brought them all. She checked her sugar on the bathroom floor with the meter balanced on her knee — three hundred and seventy-one — and dipped a ketone strip, and held it up against the color chart on the bottle with fingers that shook, and he leaned in and looked at it with her. The square on the end of the strip had gone a deep plum-purple. It matched, as near as he could tell, the second-to-last square on the chart.
"Moderate," she said. "Moderate to large. Okay."
"Is that bad?"
"It's not good." She was already unzipping the cooler. The white box with the purple stripe. She opened one of the pens with her teeth, took a needle from the hundred-count box, peeled off its paper tab, screwed it on. She dialed the pen, and it clicked, a small bright mechanical sound. "Prime two," she murmured, and pointed it at the ceiling and pressed, and a tiny bead of clear liquid appeared at the needle's tip. Then she dialed again, eighteen clicks, and lifted the hem of the PTO sweatshirt and pinched a fold of skin at her side and pushed the needle in and pressed the plunger down and held it, counting under her breath to ten, and drew it out. Then she sat for a moment with the pen in her lap and her eyes closed.
"That's the long one," Denny said.
"That's the long one." She opened her eyes. "That's my night."
She took a correction shot of the fast insulin after that, from the vial in the refrigerator, drawing it up into a syringe with her tongue between her teeth in concentration, and wrote the time and the units in the spiral notebook on the bath mat, and then she let Denny help her up off the floor and out of the bathroom and onto the end of the couch, where she could see the crib. Ruthie was standing beside it with one hand through the bars resting on her brother's stomach. The baby's eyes were closing.
"Hey, Ruthie-bird," her mother said.
The girl turned around. Her face crumpled, all at once, completely, the way Denny had been waiting for it to do since 8:31, and she came across the living room and climbed onto the couch and put her face against her mother's sweatshirt and cried. She did it almost silently. It was, Denny thought, a thing she had probably learned from living with Teddy: that you could cry without making any noise at all.
"I know," her mother said into her hair. "I know. You did so good. You did so, so good."