The night was cold for October. The backyard ran down to a strip of woods, and beyond the woods was the highway, a faint hush of tires. Jolene lit a cigarette and then, seeing Kristen's face, laughed and stubbed it out.
"Twenty-two years without a drink," she said. "I let myself have the cigarettes. You have to keep one bad thing or you'll go looking for a worse one. That's my theory, anyway. It's not a medical theory."
"Why did you do this?" Kristen asked. "You've known her what, three years?"
"Four in January." Jolene pulled the cardigan tighter. "When I had my hip replaced, my daughter didn't come. She lives in Eugene. We haven't spoken since she was twenty-four, which is a long story with a drinking mother in the middle of it, and I'm the mother. So I came home from the hospital to an empty house, and the next morning there was a knock, and it was your sister with a casserole dish of baked ziti and a seven-year-old holding a bag of frozen peas. For the swelling, he said. He'd thought of it himself." She smiled. "Shelby came by every day for three weeks. She did my compression stockings. Have you ever helped a sixty-year-old woman into compression stockings? It's not a thing you do for someone you don't love."
Kristen said nothing. She had not known about the hip, or the ziti, or the frozen peas. She had known that Shelby had a nice older neighbor. She had known that the way you know the weather in a city you've never visited.
"And when I found her on that floor," Jolene said, "I'd already done this once. With a friend of mine, in 1994. We got sober together, and then only one of us stayed that way. I didn't have the Narcan then. Nobody did." She looked at the woods. "So, no. I was not going to let her go into that program alone, and I was not going to let that boy go to strangers for thirty days while she did it. She asked me to keep him. I said yes before she finished asking."
"And you told her to tell me."
"Every single day. I told Brock too. I said, That girl's sister is going to find out, and when she does, every day you waited is going to be a brick she has to carry." Jolene turned to her. "I'm sorry I didn't call you myself. I had your number. Shelby gave it to me years ago, for emergencies. I looked at it on my phone more than once. But she made me promise, and I've broken enough promises to people I love that I couldn't stand to break one more. That was my failing. I want you to know I know that."
"Why does she think I'd take him?" Kristen said. The question came out of her raw. "I wouldn't have. I wouldn't— I would have helped."
Jolene looked at her for a long moment, with the kind of patience that had clearly been earned somewhere hard.
"Honey," she said, "I don't think she was afraid you'd take him. I think she was afraid you'd be right."
Inside, through the screen, Kristen could hear the cartoon, and under it, the steady small sound of Brock dialing, waiting, hanging up.
She looked at the woods and the dark beyond them and thought about her sister walking out of a building at six o'clock in the evening and getting into a car. Not driving to Millbrook, where her son was. Not calling anyone. Cedar Hollow was outside Hollis. Kristen had not been back to Hollis in more than a decade, not since the week they had cleaned out their mother's rented house on Pruett Street and thrown away nine garbage bags of mail and empty bottles and the green afghan their mother had died on.
Hollis had a reservoir. Lindell Reservoir, with a concrete spillway and an overlook with a chain-link fence and a gravel lot where teenagers parked. When Kristen was sixteen and Shelby was nine, and things on Pruett Street got bad, Kristen would put Shelby in the passenger seat of her rust-red Corsica and drive to the overlook and they would sit on the hood with a bag of sunflower seeds and listen to the water go over the spillway. It sounded like applause, Shelby had said once. Like the whole world clapping.