I can picture the video in my mind as if I’d watched it repeatedly, though I never saw it. Something about the act of him recording made everything sharper, higher risk. She was sloshed, wobbling, her eyelids at half-mast. “Bedroom eyes,” my dad used to say, like a femme fatale’s in an old film. Her mood had changed when she returned to the room; she was trying to be funny, trying to shuck off the uncomfortable religion discussion. She said, “I have a hard-on for it anyway.”

She thudded back down on the floor next to me. “The way we have to eat Christ’s body,” she said. No one else said anything, the camera made us self-conscious, but Lonnie remained unaffected. She slumped into the sofa, not even glancing at Carlow, not even curious. The dead air of the recording hung around us, thick and warm. Time elongated. I found myself picking on my cuticles. I hated what Carlow was doing, both because of the unnatural way it affected the room and also because it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair for him to have this weird souvenir, to be able to watch it whenever he wanted. To make it right there in front of James.

“You hung your sheets up on a windy day,” Lonnie said after a long silent pause. “You hung your sheets up to dry, but the wind took them. You lost three sheets. Three sheets . . . to the wind.”

Her finger twirled in the air as if imitating the flight path of the sheets.

“It’s a nautical idiom,” James said.

“In our house,” Lonnie continued, ignoring him, “we have four sheets. We have four beds so we have four sheets.”

“We have more sheets than that,” James said.

“Which house?” Carlow said.

“We still have one sheet left.” She held up her drink. “One more sheet.”

“You should maybe know that sheets are lines.”

“Shut up, Carlow.”

Worried now, I stood, walked over to James, and whispered, “How bad is she?”

“About as bad as I’ve seen,” James said.

“What? Ever?”

“Yeah.”

It took only one more drink for her to pass out, half a drink really. Carlow joked, “Half a sheet, must have been William’s crib sheet.”

The three of us stood over her inert body on the floor beside the couch. She looked small, her ankles and wrists so skinny. One of her shoes had come off and the smooth thin knob of her heel was the same pink as the sofa. She was slumped against the silk cushions, her hair falling in her face. It was a good position to be in; she wouldn’t choke on her own vomit, it would just fall neatly next to her.