“I broke the goddamn douche stuff. Go get a mop, will you? Help me clean this up.” He disappeared down the stairs and returned with a mop and a pail and we cleaned up the mess as well as we could and rinsed the towels in the bathtub. “I can’t believe it,” I kept saying. “I can’t believe I spilled this goddamn stuff all over the goddamn floor.”

“You can still smell it,” he said. “We’ll never get this smell out of this room.”

“I’m starving.” I had found a bathrobe on the back of the bathroom door and was tying it around my waist. “Let’s go downstairs and eat that cake. She wants us to eat that cake.”

We went downstairs and found the cake and plates and forks and poured glasses of milk and began to eat. It was the first time since I had met him that I felt that Malcolm was even in the same species with me. He had seemed a dream or a field to cross or a mountain to conquer. Now he just seemed like my brother, cleaning up the house before my mother got home and eating all the cake as fast as we could eat it.

“They always make this cake for me,” he said. “They make lemon meringue pie and upside-down cake. All my mother’s sisters make the same things for me. My brothers were away at the war when I was little. I was the only boy they had.”

“How many sisters does she have?”

“Just two now. There used to be five of them, counting my mother. They lived in Rome, where I went to school. Their daddy was a doctor.”

“What are we going to tell her about the smell?”

“I don’t know.” He laughed. “We can say your friend spilled it. How about that?” He cut us another piece of cake. I poured us each another glass of milk. Then the phone began to ring.

“What time is it?”

“I don’t know. Answer it.”

“You answer it.”

“I’m not supposed to be here. You answer it.”

“Okay.” I picked up the receiver. A woman’s voice was on the other end. Very frazzled, very frantic, very high and musical and terrible. “Miss Manning, is this you? This is Mrs. Martin, Malcolm’s mother. I hate to bother you so early in the morning. Do you know where Malcolm is? There’s been an accident. Is your friend there? Perhaps you should wake her up.”

“What is it? What happened?” There was a sob on the other end, a sound like crying. Then a man’s voice was on the line. “This is Mr. Martin, my dear. Malcolm’s father. There’s been an accident. Aunt Gaye died. Do you know where Malcolm is?”

“He’s right here. He came to take me out to breakfast. Wait a minute. Here he is.” I handed him the phone.