Sheila cleaned her as best she could while Ben held her, the sheet covering her, and she endured it, one arm around Ben’s neck, huddled against him as though he were shelter. He was simply watching her, steady, as though it were nothing. Sheila said, “You’re doing so good, Miss Dee.”

“I don’t even know why it’s so cold in here,” she answered, voice strangely slurred.

“You’ll be all right when we get you in the bed again.”

She rolled her head into Ben’s shoulder. Ronny said, “We can’t put her back in bed till the mattress dries.”

“I guess she’ll have to lay in the parlor,” said Sheila.

“She won’t like that.”

Ben shrugged. “You’ll be fine, won’t you, Miss Dee?”

That time, though, she could barely reply.

“I think something’s wrong,” Ben said.

“She can’t even talk,” said Sheila.

When he carried her to the couch—after Ronny placed clean sheets over the cushions and back—she was so limp she might have been unconscious, and one side of her face had begun to droop. They saw this clearly when she laid her head into the pillow. Ronny said, “I’m calling an ambulance,” and just at that moment an older woman walked into the room, Minette dressed as though she had come from church, with even a bit of a hat pinned to her hair, and Ronny recognized her, and she looked at them as though she had caught them at something alarming, and said, “What are you doing to my aunt?”

So: the call to the ambulance, the explanations after Minette, the niece (who most often saw her aunt at church on Sunday mornings, she said), walked into the bedroom to get a look at it; the emergency medical people asking what had happened; the story about finding her on the street the night before; but she’s always been so clearheaded, said Minette; all this while they moved her onto a stretcher and into the waiting ambulance, methodical but urgent; it might be a stroke, they said; as Minette followed the stretcher and held Miss Dee’s hand and sobbed, stood at the side of the bumper while the techs lifted the stretcher into the back, and then waited. “Do you want somebody to go with you?” Sheila asked.

She was stunned herself, the niece, not quite knowing what to do. “And you know, my mother hasn’t been gone that long,” she said, not exactly speaking to anyone. Drooping like a sapling in need of rain.

“I’d be happy to come with you.”

“No. It’s fine. I’ll call my daughter.” Minette stepped toward the ambulance, stepped back, stepped forward again, then stopped, lifting her purse, holding it with both hands, opening it to find a tissue. “I’ll let you all know what happens.”

Ben stood at the fence until the ambulance, lights still spinning, turned on its siren and maneuvered into the street. He was like a cauldron, radiating hurt, and Ronny remembered him from earlier, standing with Miss Dee bundled in his arms, looking down at her as though she were the most precious being; he turned to Ronny and let it all show, so openly, that he was aching, that he was thinking of his mother, that it was all about to rain onto him, the intensity of the loss, that he had watched his mother die, that Miss Dee, whom he liked, was on the same threshold, that this was a world of sickening and suffering and passing through. Something gathered them both, sent them inside again, into Ronny’s room where Ben’s satchel lay overturned on the floor, socks spilling out.