It killed her to have to do it, he told me. She kept rasping out apologies for bothering him, until he practically had to clamp a hand over her mouth her to make her stop talking before her voice choked off completely. At first, Trevor told me, shaking his head as if reliving the exasperation he’d felt, Irene had wanted him to simply stay at the house with Kelli while she drove to the hospital herself. Trevor had vociferously nixed that idea, and convinced her they should all go together. Yes, they all might be waiting in the ER for hours on end and, no, Kelli wouldn’t love the experience, but at least Trevor would be there to keep her entertained and distracted while they waited for Irene to get checked out. And so it was this night, Trevor told me, their night together huddled in the ER waiting area, Kelli between them, with screaming people occasionally rolling by on stretchers, and moaning people abruptly interrupting themselves with a hiccup and then vomiting onto the floor from their pain, that brought Trevor and Irene’s relationship to the next level. This was when — he didn’t say, but didn’t have to — the three became as family.

“But even before that, Miss Karie,” Trevor assured me, “I was all about your mum. I woulda done anything for that woman — I was just grateful she finally gave me a chance to prove it.”

Because, a few months before the late-night trip to the ER, Irene came upon Trevor parked in the driveway of her house, his big shoulders trembling beneath his golf shirt as he sat weeping behind the wheel of his truck. His wife had moved out earlier that day and taken Mike. You can be sure Trevor was not thrilled to be describing this incident to me. He was on his third juice glass of rum, taking it in regular, compulsive hits, like a smoker with a cigarette. After the first glass, he’d accepted my offer of an ice cube, but wasn’t bothering anymore to dilute the rum with cola. The cola had been brought along, I now understood, merely as a nod to decorum — although I certainly was making good use of it. I’d noticed that every time my drink began to dwindle, Trevor would reach over and top me off with the Captain Morgan before I could raise a hand in protest. So, to counter this, I’d started pre-emptively topping myself off with the cola in order to keep my glass full. But I couldn’t let my concentration wander from this task, otherwise Trevor would swoop in again with the Captain Morgan. So after a while I was practically replacing every sip I took with cola. It got so the whole process came to feel like a slight, unspoken argument we were having in the background of our actual conversation. Conversationally, we were being open with each other — open-handed and open-hearted, rolling a ball gently back and forth between us. But in the background, in this small way, we were doing battle.