She was silent for a moment. “I’ve got half a mind to make you walk home,” she said then. She waited, as if I might offer to do just that, and when I said nothing in response she told me to read her the number of the pay phone, which I did, and then told me to hang up and wait there for her call.

In the hours of my exhausted slumber in the front seat of the car, the city had come fully awake, traffic on the wide span of the street slipping by in waves. I wondered if I could find the bar at which I had, two or three nights before, bought a small sticky lump of black tar heroin and if I could somehow talk that same dealer into giving me just a tiny bit more on credit. Perhaps the dealer would buy the car, or perhaps we might make a trade. I wanted to die.

When the phone rang I jumped up from the curb, surprised and shocked at the loudness of that sound. “Hello, hello?” I croaked into the handset.

“John?”

“Yes, it’s me.”

“Do you have enough gasoline to get to my house?”

It took a moment for me to understand that although the voice was a woman’s, it was not the voice of my grandmother. “Who is this?” I asked.

“Kimiko Takahashi,” she said.

“Mrs. Takahashi?”

“Do you remember how to get here?”

“Yes.”

“You come here, John.”

My eyes were overbrimming with tears now. “I’m sick,” I said.

“Then I’ll come get you. Tell me where you are.”

“No, no,” I said. “Jesus.” I sniffled, trying in vain to master myself, feeling instead just how tired I was, just how utterly and completely exhausted. “I can get there. I can make it that far, I think.”

“I’ll be waiting here for you. Come straight here. You hear me, John? Come straight to my house.”

“All right,” I said.

And that was exactly what I did.

I HAD HOPED, on the drive to San Jose, that Mrs. Takahashi would simply hand me a few dollars by which I could gas up my grandmother’s sedan and make the drive back to Newcastle, but when I arrived it was to find her waiting for me on her porch, hands on hips, appraising my condition as I stepped achingly out of the car. “Come inside,” she said.

“I’m filthy,” I told her.

“You come inside now,” she said, her voice so stern that I almost expected her to stamp her foot like a mother scolding a recalcitrant child.

I did as she bade me, removing my shoes before entering the house and then marching into the bathroom. “Soap.” She pointed. “Shampoo. Leave your clothes here. I’ll wash.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I mumbled, but she only shook her head.

“I’ll get you a robe to wear.”