That first afternoon a man came to visit the woman in the other bed. It was her husband. He leaned over her, held her hands, sat near her head, and talked softly. I watched them surreptitiously. That night I slept alone without dreaming, easily.

After the morning oatmeal, I dozed again. When I woke, Joe was looking at me. The skin above and below his beard was white, lit from the window, and his eyes were set with dutifully worried creases, and also a blank puzzlement. I grinned at him.

“Ah, Sally, God,” he said at once.

“How did you get here?” I asked.

“Your mother called me. She said…” He pulled his mouth into a crook at the corner.

“I haven’t seen her. How did you find me?”

He sat down. There was no use trying to deal with my relatives. I had no interest in them, and Joe was at his best as a low-key raconteur. He had unwillingly received the anxious blast of my mother’s confidences and felt, it seemed, a certain relief in being able to pass them on to me in this comradely way. He had, I know, been anticipating being tasked with reclaiming me from my melancholia on his own, and so approached this alternative with gusto.

It was two worms. She had made an appointment with the tree surgeon and left work early to be at home when he arrived. He was actually sawing through the infected limb prior to spraying when my mother came out to watch. She turned to look at the rear of the house and saw the upstairs window open. With a nervous perspicacity wholly typical of her, she determined to investigate the window while the workman was still on the premises, just in case there should be a burglar huddled in some closet.

Joe hesitated at this point. His embarrassment was suddenly acute, we had encountered a part of the story he would rather not have heard. Or perhaps his shyness was not in knowing it but in telling it to me.

I had fouled the bed. My mother would have noticed the smell immediately. I casually shielded my eyes with one hand not to see his face. Convinced that I was very ill, she had called out the window for help and was in the process of rolling me out of my own loose dung when she came across the bag beneath the bed. She reached into it, looking for a cloth of any kind to wipe me off, and encountered the bottles. A quick glance at the litter of papers would have provided the rest of the evidence.

She stripped off my nightgown, wrapped me in a blanket, and carried me by my feet. The tree surgeon took my shoulders. He drove us to the hospital in his pickup. She sat in the back holding my hands.

“Why hasn’t she come to see me?” I asked suddenly.