. . .

Fellis was all worked up while Beth went and got Aunt Alice, yet I didn’t have much to say to calm him down. He wasn’t worried about her health—he just didn’t want her to yell at him, because unlike her sister, Aunt Alice could rip into Fellis.

The phone rang while Beth was gone, and I went to it and picked it up, yet nobody said anything. “I know it’s you,” I said and hung up.

In the living room, Fellis had the TV off and he was sitting upright rubbing his face. I sat down next to him.

“It was an accident,” I said. “Quit worrying.”

“What is that?” Fellis said.

“What?”

“You smell that?”

The chicken and green bean casserole was on fire in the stove, and Fellis went to the cupboard under the sink and grabbed the fire extinguisher, and he squeezed the trigger but nothing came out.

“Remove the pin,” I said.

He did, and he sprayed white into the stove.

The front door opened and then banged shut.

“Is that the chicken?” Beth said. Alice was behind her, coughing, and between the two of them little Lily peeked her head at us.

“It’s out,” Fellis said.

“Get me that pill,” Alice said. She was fanning herself. “I can’t breathe.”

“Oh, calm down,” Beth said. “You’re overreacting. It’s an Adderall.”

“I’m not overreacting, Beth.” Alice picked up Lily and put her on the couch. She turned on the TV but didn’t change the channel from The People’s Court.

“Get your auntie a Klonopin,” Beth said, fanning smoke out of the kitchen and through the back sliding door.

Alice sat down in the kitchen, still fanning smoke from her face while Fellis brought her the pill and a glass of water. She took it, and water dribbled down her chin.

“I’m sorry,” Fellis said. “I should have read the labels.”

Alice set the glass down. “You should’ve, but you didn’t. At least I got my bills done.”

. . .

We ate McDonald’s that cloudy summer night. Beth came back with three bags full of double cheeseburgers, fries, three four-piece chicken nuggets, and one fish filet with no cheese that was for Alice. Beth bought Cokes too, which Alice said she couldn’t drink but she drank anyway, and after we ate at the kitchen table among the greasy wrappers—after Fellis bitched and bitched about his treatments, how the nurses said he might have to get a chest port because it was difficult to find a vein—Beth cleaned up the garbage and Aunt Alice put Lily to bed and Fellis went all around the house looking for Transcendence, and when he found it he slid it into the DVD player in the living room, and as he and Beth and Alice sat on the couch—“God, I hate Johnny Depp,” Aunt Alice said, to which Beth said, “Why? He’s a hot Navajo,” and the two argued whether or not he was Native—there was no room for me with them on the couch, and so I told them I’d be right back and went outside to get a chair, but while there in the dark I stepped on something hard. Fellis’s pack of smokes he’d lost. I took one but didn’t have a lighter, and so I stuck the smoke behind my ear and looked at the fold-out chairs in the dark, and I said out loud under the swaying oak, “You should be ashamed of yourself.” I was and I wasn’t. I’d made my choice, knew what I was going to do, yet I didn’t want to do it. It wasn’t the right choice either. Keep on with her or don’t—neither was right.