“You gotta make some decisions,” said Trevor.

I nodded. “I do.”

“But most of all,” said Trevor, “you gotta ask for help when you need it! That’s what that number on the goddamn effing fridge is for.”

I nodded some more. Trevor sat down across from me again. He’d been pacing from the moment he’d rammed my plate into the fridge and slammed the door.

“It’s not that I don’t think you can do this,” he told me.

I looked up at him. “Do what?”

“Look after your sister. You got it in ya, Miss Karie.”

“Thank you,” I said after a moment.

It seemed Trevor believed I doubted that about myself. He thought my anxiety was wrapped up in a fear that I was not capable of caring for Kelli, when I knew full well that I was. I’d spent my entire childhood and teenage years in training for it — trained impeccably by the mother of all experts. True, I might never be in Irene Petrie’s league, but it wasn’t that I thought I couldn’t do it. That was not the fear at all.

“You girls had a scare tonight,” said Trevor. “But we got through it, eh?” He reached over and put his hand on my forearm. I looked at it and was startled by its size — his freckled pinkie was at the crease of my elbow and his hairy blond thumb was at my wrist. “All you needed was a little bit of help.”

But Trevor didn’t know as much as he thought he did. Yes, it had been my first Kelli-emergency without my mother, but on the grand scale of Kelli-emergencies, it was pretty small potatoes. There had been shit, and shit was unpleasant, but shit wiped off. It was nothing compared to the terror of her nearly burst appendix at twelve, or the second-degree burns on both palms at fifteen (she’d thought she could pick up the boiling kettle by the sides instead of the handle), the blocked windpipe, the ear infections, the soaring fevers, and so on.

Now Kelli was in bed, emptied out, but obediently drinking tea and replenishing her fluids. She’d be ok. We’d been through worse, my sister and I.

Trevor gave my forearm a final squeeze with his massive pink hand and apologized for, as he called it, the “tough love.”

“I should get a move on.” He stood up and stretched. “I’ll just poke my head in and say good night to Beaner.” But he didn’t move. He was waiting for me to say the thing I was supposed to say.

“Thanks so much, Trevor,” I told him. “I don’t know what we would’ve done without you.”

Kelli was in her bedroom as I had left her, sipping sweet black tea with a bendy straw out of the largest mug in the house. My mother had kept a stash of these straws in one of the lower cupboards, precisely for occasions such as this, because just as Kelli gulped her food, she also gulped her liquids. The bendy straw was a way to encourage little sips, and even though Kelli was perfectly capable of hoovering up her tea with it, she seemed to grasp that the straw required a more delicate approach.