So we went looking for dinner. I wanted barnacle food that would grip the inside of my stomach. All those years of liquor still needed sponges—something doughy, something fatty—to soak up what was left. The mist made our skin wet and turned our fingers into cold rubber. The streets were empty. Stella shivered. “It’s like a ghost town.”

I got the sense she didn’t mean ghost town like an empty place but like a place full of ghosts, and it was true: the bums were all around us.

We walked past skyscrapers and triple-story clothing stores. There were coffee shops bigger than my whole trailer. We didn’t like the feel of Market, so we turned onto a side street and ducked into a crowded noodle shop. It smelled like cooked meat, and the air was warm and heavy like it might turn into greasy raindrops. A short guy with a mustache shoved two menus into our hands and pointed to a table squashed into one corner, under a painted dragon. Stella sat down and asked for water.

“I thought we were going back to eat with Abe,” I said.

“Sure,” she said, standing abruptly. “I forgot. Of course.”

“You take this or stay?” the man asked.

“We’ll go,” said Stella. “We’re going.”

“Wait outside,” he said. “I come ask what you want.”

We stood outside, and through the windows, we watched other people dip their chopsticks into noodle piles. We wanted beef soup, both of us. We didn’t know what to get for Abe. I thought maybe he wanted chicken. When he was a little boy, he liked little-boy foods—sloppy joes, mac and cheese—which were cheap, and two weeks weren’t long enough for him to get tired of them. His nannies always made him eat vegetables at his dad’s, he complained. It made me sad to think of: it was their job and they took it seriously, these women; and I was his mother, feeding him junk from cardboard boxes.

We walked home in the dark and stumbled over the sidewalks, broken by roots. I’d called Abe to say we’d gotten him chicken soup. He said he’d be late. “You guys should eat.”

“I’ll wait,” I said. “I want to.”

“Don’t wait.”

“Will you say hello, at least? When you get home?”

“You might…You’ll probably be asleep.”

“Then wake me up. Doesn’t matter when.”

I put his food in the fridge and wrote Chicken for Abe on the paper bag, though there wasn’t much to get it confused with. The shelves were empty. I also wrote a note that said Chicken for Abe in here and fixed it with a magnet onto the fridge door. There was a calendar of photographs hanging from the side of the freezer, black-and-white highways stretching into the distance. It was still on February. Abe hardly lived here. He’d said as much in his notes: I have a second bed at the office. I always thought it was a little joke. I’d looked over those notes for hours, trying to figure out what kind of guy he was—what would make him angry, what would make him laugh.