“Goin somewhere?”

“No,” I said, standing there with my shoes untied.

“Good,” said Trevor, “’cause I think I hear Beaner gettin up to see what all the excitement is out here.” He turned away and went back to the kitchen.

Since Kelli was up, Kelli had to be fed. I sat sipping the nightmare coffee as Trevor placed sizzling slices of bacon to blot on a doubled-up piece of paper towel. Kelli and I almost never had bacon because of the nitrates, so this — on top of the surprise of Trevor greeting her when she woke up — made for a thrilling morning for my sister.

“Trebie bacon,” she murmured when he put the plate down in front of her.

“Now you take it easy with that,” said Trevor. “Don’t inhale it all at once.”

“Cut it up into pieces, Kelli,” I advised.

“Cut it up small,” Kelli murmured. She whispered this a few more times to herself, hacking away at her plate until the egg and bacon and toast Trevor had served up was a pulverized, slimy yellow hash.

“I love a woman of appetites!” Trevor declared. He put the next plate in front of me and then sat down with one himself and began to eat.

“Surprised you have much appetite after last night,” I said after a moment.

“You kidding?” said Trevor around a mouthful of egg. “This stuff is the ultimate hangover cure right here.”

I watched him chew. He glanced at me.

“You gonna eat?” said Trevor.

“No, I’m not gonna eat,” I said.

“Look,” said Trevor. “Let’s just get through breakfast, ok? Then we’ll get Beaner all settled in her chair and we can have a good talk.” He picked up his toast and mopped at the swirl of yoke and ketchup on his plate.

As Trevor cleaned up, I decided to eat everything on my plate after all. There was nothing I wanted to do less, but I felt as if the bad coffee was sizzling away my stomach lining, so in the next instant I gulped the greasy food like medicine. It was the same impulse as the one that had driven me to the foyer to pull on my sneakers. A feeling like I needed to be fortified. I sat with my eyes closed, willing myself to keep it down, as Trevor teased Kelli. She had gotten stuck on her way to the living room the way she sometimes did as she moved throughout the house. “Putting herself on pause,” my mother used to call it. Kelli just sometimes stopped on her way to wherever she was going and decided to linger for a while, wherever she happened to be. Now she leaned against the doorframe, running her hand along it almost thoughtfully and whispering to herself. She looked interested, engaged. You could imagine she was having a conversation with some entity residing in the walls.

“Whup!” said Trevor. “She got stalled, Mother! I had an old jalopy used to do that.”