This a few days after Chiggers’s departure as I stood in my grandmother’s kitchen, wanting a cigarette or a cup of coffee or both, wanting something to do with my hands to keep them from shaking, having been drunk for much of the two days before, including, to a somewhat lesser extent, those hours I spent behind the counter at the filling station. I knew I was slipping toward some further darkness, and I knew that the drinking was only a half measure against it. Chiggers’s visit had something to do with this spiral, although it was difficult to pinpoint exactly what his presence had done to me. Perhaps his departing admission that he still felt like someone was trying to kill him was enough to send me over the edge, if this was indeed what going over the edge felt like. All I really knew was that the measure the alcohol provided was insubstantial given the enormity of the great glass well into which all my fears seemed to swirl without end.

My grandmother, that morning, looked at me gravely, waiting for a response of some kind. She was not so directly critical of my behavior as my parents often were, especially her daughter, my mother, but there was perhaps a knot of criticism stuffed hard against her sense of concern, her eyes bright and watchful in the soft dry thin-lined whiteness of her face.

“I’m okay, Gran,” I told her.

“You most certainly are not,” she said. “I can smell the liquor on you from here.”

“I’ve gotta get to work.”

“You can’t do that,” she said now. “Not yet.”

She rose and pulled me into the small confines of the washroom, one hand tight on my wrist, the other stoppering the claw-foot tub and turning the spigot on full.

“Hot bath,” she said. “Cure all.” Then she paused and said, “Well, not cure all but it’ll help.”

“I don’t want to take a bath, Gran.”

“And yet that’s what you’re gonna do.”

“I’m not a child.”

“Aren’t you? I’ll bring you a clean set of clothes and I’ll set a cup of coffee right here on the counter. You can drink it in the tub if you want.”

Then she left the room, the door swinging closed behind her. And because she was my grandmother and because I think I needed, more than anything else, for someone to simply tell me what it was I should do, I climbed into the blazing heat of the tub, sinking down to my chin and then submerging myself altogether, the ceiling above me wobbling in the rippling heat.