“No,” she said. “Keep them down.”

*   *   *

I called Abe and got his voice mail. I called again and again, probably ten times, until he picked up. I knew he never switched off his phone.

“I work, you know,” he said, but his tone was easy. “Or maybe you forgot?”

I told him where we’d been. “She spent the night,” I said. “We both did.”

“You said she was doing better,” he said, voice hurt. He said he’d catch the soonest flight he could manage.

She told both of us: It wouldn’t happen again. She’d seen how bad it could get. She showed me where she’d been keeping her liquor—a few handles under the bed, beside the toilet, behind her slippers in the closet—and we took everything outside in big black garbage bags.

I told Tilly there were programs that could help, but she told me there wasn’t a program for what she had. She’d tried a meeting once, but it only made her feel worse. Abe had gone with her, but then he’d ducked out early, upset. Someone had stopped her afterward, a perfect stranger: “Your son won’t stay ashamed forever,” she said. “Trust me.”

There was one thing Tilly wanted. She said she needed a liquor nanny. I wanna trust myself, she said. But I can’t. Could she sleep with me? In my room?

We pumped up an air mattress and put it under the window. She took my bed. I liked seeing the stars and the blood glow of an old Coca-Cola billboard. There were noises I heard all night: the sounds of bums’ shopping carts creaking along the rutted ground, the keening sobs of squeaky wheels.

The inflatable mattress had a leak. I’d wake up on the hardwood floor, lying on a sleeve of rubber. One night I turned on the pump to reinflate, but it groaned so loudly and so long that Tilly woke up like a spook—snap! just like that, her body stiff as a board—and said, “I didn’t take it!” I knew I’d cut right through to her dreams. Her eyes were open wide, but she was still asleep, you could tell, the whites were blank as bones.

The home Abe left was different from the one he returned to. We still made love, but it was more tentative now—we were careful with each other’s body, careful to keep quiet. Why can’t she stick with something? he said. I’ve always stuck with everything. I let him hold me for minutes, sometimes hours, and then I pulled away. I let him sleep. I slept with Tilly.

I missed waking up with him, both of us drugged with the muscle memory of sex, the stick and pith of half-remembered dreams. It felt indulgent to mingle so much of ourselves, to lose track of our edges. But there was something even better about shivering against the wood, waking up with my sore spine and knowing, knowing, that I’d shared the night with a woman who would have been alone. We filled that room with our breathing, night after night, and didn’t mess it up with all our talk. She woke up sober every morning and we opened the window, leaned out in our nightgowns, maybe smoked a cigarette or maybe didn’t, and thought, We have no idea what today will be. And believed it.