“I might. If I get time.”

“Well, I got to get the wax if you think you might. Here, have a biscuit. Get some of that jelly over there.” I handed her a plate of toasted biscuits. “You want an egg?” I added. “Scramble you an egg.”

“Nah, not now. I guess I might go on and stay the morning.” She was stirring sugar and evaporated milk into her coffee. She was spooning jelly onto a biscuit. “But you got to let me get some sleep. You got to keep them off of me. Where’s the baby? I want to look in on him.”

“Don’t wake them up. I feel terrible, Klane. I really have a hangover.”

“You been drinking too much. You been drinking every night.”

“No, I haven’t. It just seems that way.” I raised my eyes, looked out the kitchen window to where the sun was coming out from in between the clouds and lighting up the branches of the crepe myrtle tree. Sunlight glistened on every gray-green branch. How could anything so perfectly balanced and cantilevered and shaded and luminous and gorgeous and beautiful and useful be created, over and over again, everywhere on earth. For a moment I could see infinity, the window, branch, blossoms, clouds, sky, stretching up forever and ever, world without end. I shook it off.

“You leaving these babies too much. Miss Winchester tole me you was gone all weekend and she didn’t even know where Malcolm was.”

“He was mad at me. He went to a motel. He tore the phone out of the wall. You know about that.”

“Well, I’m going back and look in on the baby.” She finished off a second biscuit, folded the crumbs up into a napkin, and laid the plate on the sink.

“Don’t wake them up.”

“I won’t. I’m just going to look in at the door.”

She left the room. I sipped my coffee and thought about the night. Our new friends, Speed and Karla and Robert and Hilton, and Malcolm and me. Getting drunk on grasshoppers and dancing on the sidewalk in our midriff blouses.

“He’s still asleep,” Klane said, coming to stand in the door. “That medicine’s not doing him no good. You ought to have them change it. You better take him back.”

“I took him Wednesday. They said he’s doing okay.” She shook her head. “It’s them mosquitoes,” she said. “It’s them mosquitoes that did it.” She came into the room. She began to pick up the plates from the table. “You ought to take him to a different doctor.”

A wave of melancholy passed through me. Melancholy and helplessness. I took him to the doctor nearly every day. I waited in the waiting room. I bought the medicine and gave it to him. Still he did not get well. He kept on running the fever in the afternoons. What else could I do?