I ran a hot bath. I wasn’t sure if baths were good for drunks—maybe they only deepened the fog of the liquor, bled out the mind through the pores—but I wanted to give Tilly something nice against her skin. The bubbles scattered like beard stubble across the water. She soaked while I watched a true-crime program on TV. She filled a bath to bring them back to life. The show was about an alligator farmer who’d been murdered. Everybody thought it was his stepdaughter, only fourteen, but nobody had any proof. They all knew he’d been raping her anyway. Not raping, exactly, but whatever you call it when somebody says yes but doesn’t know what’s good for them.

Tilly took so long I was afraid she’d fallen asleep in the water or passed out from the heat. I knocked on the door to make sure she was okay. Her voice came back a moment later: “You can go. I’m fine.”

Later, I would learn to recognize this—the hope that if she waited long enough, I’d simply go away. More than anything, she hated looking like a fool.

She came out in a clean white bathrobe. Her hair was dark from water, the twined colors of stained wood and steel gray. She jerked one hand through its dripping nest.

“I can comb it,” I said. “If that’s easier.”

I’d never had a younger sister or even a girl cousin, anyone.

She didn’t reply but sat on the edge of the bed, like she was giving me permission, and I sat cross-legged behind her, running a comb through each section until it hung perfectly straight down her back.

“What happened?” I asked her.

“It felt better,” she said, “and then it didn’t.”

I pulled her hair from the teeth of the comb and gathered the woolly tumbleweed in my closed fist.

“I just thought…” She paused. “I thought, once more.”

I ran my palm along the slick curve of her scalp. “It’s all brushed out.”

“You’re good at that,” she said. “Dora always yanked so hard.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know.”

I found her naked in bed the next morning, sheets flung aside. Her face and body were covered with a jaundiced sheen. She sat up slowly, tapping her fingers against the blanket. She balled one hand into a fist, then shoved it under a pillow. I realized she had tremors. She was trying to hide them. “Well,” she whispered. “I guess we should hit the road.” I could hardly look at this woman: skin pale, eyelids fluttering, hands scuttling like animals across the bedspread.

“No,” I said. “We’re going to do this here.”

Four days, I told her. No liquor. I gave up my room upstairs and moved into hers.

“You’re not supposed to stop cold,” she said. “You know that, right?”