At home, the driveway was empty, and I cussed on my way indoors and through the kitchen and down the hall to the bathroom where I threw up in the toilet with the lights off. The phone was ringing out in the kitchen, but I let it go. With my head under the sink faucet I swallowed three Tylenol, and then with some soap I washed my hands of the rust, washed my face and behind my ears and around my nose, and then did it all two times more to make sure I got everything, all of it. I refused to look at myself in the mirror.

The phone started ringing again.

My hands were wet when I answered the phone and said hello, but nobody said anything back. I hung up and was on my way to the bathroom when I looked at the stove clock.

It wasn’t even morning; it was half past three in the afternoon.

When my mother came back later, I was in the living room with the TV on low and a lit cigarette I couldn’t drag from without getting nauseated. She had some groceries and asked me where I was this morning.

“I lost track of time,” I told her, and she said nothing because she was sick of me. How could she not be? It’s just been us two for the past six years. How’d we get here? That’s Fellis’s question, but it’s mine too. How’d we get here? I’m starting to think that each time I ask it, each time I consider an answer, I wind up farther away from where I should be, from where I was. Where I had been. I left a lot of things behind. Or maybe that’s not it—maybe it’s that a lot of things had left me behind. Friends. Family. Relationships. The future.

I put out the cigarette and stood to leave. My mother didn’t care to know where her twenty-eight-year-old son was going, but before I left I asked her when she was going next to Woodlands.

“Tomorrow,” she said. She stood at the sideboard with a candle in a glass jar and a knife, lengthening the wick. “Same time.”

I told her I wouldn’t miss it again. She scraped wax off the knife with her fingernail, which she then rubbed off on a dirty cloth. I waited for her to say something more until I knew she’d said it all.