I ran the water cold and filled two cups of water. Abe and I sat at the table. We brought the box over from the fruit crate. We wanted to keep it close.

He looked at his glass of water. I looked at my glass of water. Neither one of us was drinking. My lips were parched.

“We had things,” he said. “We really did. Just me and her.”

“Then tell me. If you’re willing.”

“There was one summer,” he said. “It was the best summer. I don’t know why. It just was. We made lemonade and tried to sell it. We ended up drinking most of it ourselves. That whole state—this whole state, I mean—was like a drying machine. She said, You wear something nice and they’ll lap up your sauce like dogs. And she was right. I put on this little starched white shirt and started selling three pitchers a day.”

He stopped. I looked at his face and then his fingers, white from clutching his glass. I drank the rest of my water in small, steady sips. There was some comfort in that. I couldn’t say what it was, going through the early motions of afterward. Watching Abe drink his too.

We drove into the desert at dusk. We were the only ones for miles. We licked our lips against the wind. The sky was raw pink like chapped skin. There were mountains in the distance without range or names.

I didn’t have anything prepared to say. There hadn’t been any time before we left, only the dull stomachache of waking up too early and riding cold and hungry for miles, not knowing what we’d find—impossible to imagine exactly this moment.

“I wrote something down,” Abe said. “I kept trying to get it right.” He pulled a sheet of lined paper from his pocket, neatly folded in four. On the ground between us, the box rattled in the hard wind. He read like a schoolboy in a recital.

I was twelve years old, and she convinced me I wasn’t going to die. I was staying at her trailer and I woke up in the middle of the night and I couldn’t move my arms or my legs or any part of me. I thought I couldn’t speak but then I could. I said, “Tilly.” And then I said it louder: “Tilly.” I never called her Mom. I tried to wriggle my toes and couldn’t. I tried to roll my shoulder and I couldn’t. I shouted, “Tilly! Tilly! Tilly!”