Tilly told me she and Grandma Lucy had gotten drunk together, just once, years before. They hadn’t meant to. Her mother had pleaded, Let’s get out of the house, please, just for an afternoon, and wore a strand of pearls to brunch at the prettiest hotel in town, the pink one where the movie stars went. They ordered mimosas and French toast and they really, really tried. They talked about the newest woman in Lucy’s bridge group—from somewhere in France, always bidding too high, always trusting her trumps. They talked about a kind of casserole that had bananas you couldn’t taste, used for secret texture. They kept ordering mimosas like royalty. The thing about drinking, she said, is we were still ourselves, only more so.

Tilly spilled her third drink and everyone looked, actors and agents, and they watched orange juice run through the cobblestone gutters and Lucy spoke in a hushed voice, Mop it up, and Tilly said, What’s that? And Lucy said, You heard just fine. And Tilly admitted she was probably speaking pretty loudly: Speak up, probably yelling, if you’ve got something to say to me, and tipped the other glass all over her mother’s lap. You should fucking say it, why don’t you? Just say it.

“When I hear the story how I’m telling it,” Tilly said, “it sounds like everything was my fault.”

Abe said Detroit was beautiful. This was a secret the middle of the country was keeping. After snow, the whole city looked like it was covered with frosting. Abe woke up and watched smokestacks spread their steam over the cold dawn sky.

He asked about Tilly. I gave him pieces. She was using his car for excursions to Inverness and Half Moon Bay. There was a day she’d planned a garden and that was a good day, one of her best. He wanted the bigger picture. He wanted to know if she was okay. I told him I didn’t know. He kept asking. He wanted that, not if—wanted to know that she was okay, that I was okay, wanted these things blooming in the faraway middle of his smoke-breathing Detroit.

It wasn’t lying, exactly. Sometimes Tilly did seem okay. One night we played music in the living room and plugged in a plastic disco ball she’d brought from her trailer. It turned around and around, scattering jewels across the walls. We danced to songs so fast we couldn’t tell if they were supposed to be angry or happy. We collapsed on the couch. Tilly kept looking at the door like she was waiting for it to open.

Hours later, I woke up to the sound of my cell phone. It was her. She said, “I’m calling from the living room floor.”

I found her curled on the hardwood. She had an empty bottle in one hand and another one broken near her hip, leaking cheap red something.

I knelt next to her. “You okay?”

“No,” she said. “Not really.”