Someone is in the kitchen. I can hear a cupboard open, the whistling of a teapot, the sound of porcelain, the clinking of a spoon as it makes its rounds. Tom emerges, carrying a coffee mug and a plate of crackers. I try to sit up, but pain flashes through my head, and I decide to stay lying down.

He sits in the wooden chair beside the couch. “Tea and crackers. You okay?” he asks, placing them on the end table.

“Never better,” I mumble, sighing.

I try to sit up again, and this time I make it, although my head is throbbing and my stomach feels like an empty pit. I take a cracker and let it dissolve in my mouth before swallowing it.

“How’d I end up here?” I ask, though I have hazy memories of coming up the steps, my arm draped over Tom’s shoulders.

“I had to help you up the steps. You’re not as light as you used to be.”

“I’m sorry. I threw up in your storage room.”

He waves it off with one hand. “It’s okay. I took care of it.”

I sigh, reach up, hold on to my forehead. I hate it that Tom had to help me. I don’t want to be indebted to him for anything. It makes me feel weak and inferior.

“What happened, Tom?” I ask, staring at the floor.

“I don’t know. I found you on the floor in the hall.”

“Not that.” I pause. “What happened to us? What happened to our friendship? What happened to you?”

“That’s a lot of different questions.”

“I know it is. But something’s changed. Something’s here between us that was never there before.” Yet even as I’m saying it, I know it’s not true, because I had felt this way once before—on the day Mary and I got married. I felt this emanating from Tom when we first broached the topic and during the whole ride to the mobile home chapel. It’s here again, this sense that something is between us, something we can’t find our way past.

He doesn’t reply. I think of you.

“What time is it?” I ask.

He glances over his shoulder. “Around ten p.m.”

“Pearl,” I whisper. I make a move to stand, but the blood rushes to my head along with a streak of pain, and my stomach twists. I can’t get up.

“Would you like me to check on her?”

I nod slowly, reach for the tea, and hold it in front of my face, the steam clearing my nasal passages. Tom vanishes into the dark shadows of the hall, and only then do I think of the ruined carpet rolled up in Shirley’s old room, the scratches on the floor. I consider going after him, stopping him, coming up with some excuse that I should be the one to check on Pearl. But resignation sets in, and with it, some small relief.

I think through what it will be like for him to demand that we leave. Am I fit to drive? How many stops will we have to make on our way home? Who can come to the house and watch over you if I don’t recover from this particular bout of sickness?