“Please?” I said.

He snapped open his eyes and breathed in sharply. I was fidgeting with my fingers, creeping into the room.

“On top of the covers,” he said.

I laughed. “Are we in middle school?” I asked.

“Take it or leave it,” he said.

I took my shoes off and lay on top of the blanket next to him. I didn’t dare touch him. He seemed stiff, like his whole body was on guard against me lying there. “Where were you before this?” I asked.

“Jail,” he said.

I didn’t jump, but the hairs on my neck stood up. “Why?” I asked.

“You don’t want to know.”

“Have you killed someone?” I asked.

He turned on his side to face me. “Yes,” he said. “But not in the way that you think.”

I looked into his blue, blue eyes.

“Go to sleep,” he said, and closed them, and I lay there for a long time, clenched and awake, watching him breathe. I didn’t know if he was sleeping, but he didn’t move, and at some point I fell deeply asleep, curled on my side with my forehead touching his shoulder.

When I woke up, he was gone.

I looked in the bathroom for anything personal. There were razors and shaving soap that you lathered with a brush. Witch hazel and alcohol. A bottle of aspirin. Nothing with his name on it, nothing that wasn’t also completely generic.

In the kitchen there was no coffee, only tea, and only black. There was bread, and whiskey, and in the refrigerator, some eggs and cheese.

On the little metal table in the kitchen, where there might be a bowl of fruit or a bouquet of flowers, were still lifes of bone. A piece that was flat and curved, like a shoulder blade or a hip, and another that was a circular section of spine. Beside them, a white glass vase. Instead of flowers, there was a bunch of feathers, black and brown ones, striped ones, like from a hawk. More delicate than flowers and sturdier, I thought. They wouldn’t lose their beauty. They wouldn’t die. Neither would the bones. What was already dead couldn’t die again.

I went back to the house at first light, roused Birdie, and walked her out to the public bathroom in the park. My mother had gotten up in the night, eaten an entire box of gingersnaps, left a mess of crumbs and a broken plate in the kitchen, and then gone back to sleep. Beside her, I found a bottle of Rebel Yell, tipped over and empty. At six, she was still sleeping it off, so I covered up Birdie and kissed her head, took the keys off the hook, and drove the truck to work in the same dirty clothes I had slept in.

At the end of my shift, damp with dishwater and sore, I asked Junior if I could use the house phone. “Okay if I?” I said, picking up the receiver. I knew it would be, but I also knew I should ask first, because I couldn’t always predict Junior’s pan-throwing moods.