“Bother me?”

“You know. I don’t want to do stuff. I just want to be here.”

Ronny said, “Okay.”

“You don’t mind?”

“I’m just glad you’re here, Ben.”

Talked about Miss Dee, then. How long had she been this bad? Well, it was hard to say. She had always been forgetful in small ways. And she was more feeble. Every month. One of the reasons Ronny had stayed in the house instead of going back to the dorm. Details. The morning he found Miss Dee at the back fence wondering where that big building, Granville Towers, had come from. Had it been there the day before? Because she remembered a house that way, her friend Naomi Winship, and it was gone, and had somebody tore it down overnight? Or the day she had dropped an egg and never noticed and stepped into it again and again, tracking raw yolk as far as her bedroom door. Walking laboriously to a shop on Franklin Street to buy a steam iron because her old one broke and then doing the same thing a day later and standing bewildered in the bedroom, two boxed irons on the bed, upset, tears coming to her eyes, because she had spent more money than she could afford. Or somebody had given her one of the irons, maybe? Was that how it had happened? She’d been too confused to think about it and sat in her chair for a long time. Ronny had taken back one of the boxes and gotten a refund for her, but it took some convincing, the store clerk skeptical, wary, thinking at first that Ronny was trying to cheat Miss Dee.

Ben had sobered up a long time ago, walked down to the kitchen for water, stirred around quietly, returned saying Miss Dee’s door was partly open, the way they had left it, and she was lying quiet under the blankets. Nearly three in the morning by then.

They fell asleep side by side on the bed, still in their clothes, the scratch of thick denim, Ben’s heavy leg thrown over Ronny, his breath sour. It should have been the sweetest night. But Ronny woke up listening every hour or so and worried, out of tangled snippets of dreaming, Miss Dee in a strange hotel that was like a hospital, checking on her room over and over again, finding pictures of Ben’s mother in the hallway under rubbish, images that succeeded one after another with no connection. Rushing through his rest.

In the morning Ben stayed. This was the fact that underlay the rest: going downstairs, telling Jamal and a couple of the other boarders what had happened. No one had the telephone number for Minette, her niece. Miss Dee had yet to get out of bed and the door was closed. It felt wrong to knock on the door—she might have forgotten about her walk, and she would surely be puzzled by their concern—and they were boys, all of them, and had no business in her room. So they whispered in the kitchen, with Ben looming at the back door, watching the morning; and later, turning to Ronny, raising a hand, and walking out.