Sunday afternoon, I had just turned off the game when there was a knock on my door so light I wasn’t even sure that it was a knock until the second rap came.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me. Abby Little from across the hall.”

As I unbolted the double set of locks, it struck me as funny that she felt compelled to use her last name. As if “Abby from across the hall” wouldn’t be enough to identify her. Or even just “Abby.”

“Hey there.”

“Can I come in?”

I glanced over her head to the shut apartment door behind her. “Sure. Does your mom know you’re here?”

“She’s got company. She told me to come see if you were home.”

That didn’t sound good. “Is one of your aunts or uncles over?” I didn’t even know if she had any.

“No. It’s the tired guy.”

“What tired guy?”

“The one who makes Mommy tired.”

Coming down off a high would do that to you. My apartment was pretty lame—other than the TV, there wasn’t much for a five-year-old to do. I honestly wasn’t even sure what a five-year-old did do. “Do you have homework?”

“No.”

I didn’t have a kitchen table, only a single lonely stool that was counter height. I lifted Abby up and sat her on it. “Want a snack?”

She licked her lips and nodded. God, this kid was so easy to please. I supposed we appreciated the simple things in life when we were deprived of basics. Having an addict for a mother, those basic things often included food, medical care, and attention of any kind. I pulled a box of Reese's Peanut Butter Puffs from my cabinet and showed Abby. “Cereal okay?”

She nodded fast and gave me a big smile. Every time my mother dumped me at Grams’ house, Grams always cooked up a feast. Up until that moment, I hadn’t thought anything of it. I guess I just figured that she was my grandma—grandmas cook. But seeing Abby walk in made me realize for the first time that Marlene had probably known I was hungry, too. There was so much about my grandmother I’d taken for granted.

After Abby’s belly was full, I washed her bowl and considered the situation. What would Marlene do? She would have asked me what I wanted to do.

“What do you want to do this afternoon, Abby?”

“Can we go to the park?”

“Sure. But we better go tell your mom and get your coat first.”

The familiar smell of burnt plastic hit me when I opened the door to their apartment. “Lena?”

She didn’t answer. But the smell of crack told me what she was doing. “Stay here a minute, okay, Abby?”

I left Abby in the kitchen and walked to the bedroom. “Lena?” I called again.

Nothing.

I knocked on the door, not realizing it wasn’t fully closed. “Lena?” The impact inched it open. Enough so that I got a look at what was inside. Lena was on her knees, her head bobbing up and down while the loser crackhead who had been coming around held a fistful of her hair in one hand and a crack pipe to his lips with the other.

I froze. And not because seeing a woman giving a blowjob was shocking. Privacy and humility hadn’t exactly been rampant in the abandoned houses I’d spent time living in with other junkies. No, I froze because of the crack pipe. I wanted a hit almost as much as I hated the shit.

The loser caught me staring and sneered. My watching was doing it for him. He took another long hit from the pipe, fisted Lena’s hair harder and thrust his hips, so she had no choice but to take him deep into her throat as he came.

I wanted to vomit.

I wanted a hit of that pipe.

I needed to get the hell out of there.

I grabbed the first small jacket I could find in the closet and rushed Abby toward the door. It could have been her watching that.

“We can go?”

I was already opening the door to get the hell out of that apartment. “Mommy said it’s fine.”

Abby and I took the subway downtown. There was no way I was taking her to a park in our drug-infested neighborhood. That experience wouldn’t be good for either of us. I also needed to get far away from temptation. So I took her to a small park I walked by every day, not far from where Grams lived.

We spent an hour in the park. I sat on a bench and watched Abby play with a little girl about her age. At one point, she ran over to me and asked if she could take a juice box from the little girl’s mother. At least she was smart enough to ask permission before taking things from strangers—even moms in the park. That was a good sign, since God knew who she might be around with her mother falling back into drugs.

It was starting to get dark, and both of us clearly weren’t ready to go back uptown. So on a whim, even though I’d already visited Marlene earlier today, I decided to take this little toothy, grinning girl to visit my grandmother. We headed toward Broadhollow Manor together.

The nurse stopped me at sign-in. “She’s not doing that well this evening.”

“What do you mean? I saw her earlier, and she was fine.”

“I don’t want to get you nervous. It could be nothing. But she’s a little lethargic. More out of it than usual.”

“Did a doctor see her?”

“Yes. And we’re watching her for any signs of change. This sometimes happens with Alzheimer’s patients, you should know. They have good days and bad days. It’s difficult at times to know if a bad day is just a normal bad day or something we should be concerned with.”

“Can I see her?”

“Of course. I didn’t mean to scare you. I just wanted to warn you. She’s had a good few weeks, but she does have bad days sometimes. This could just be one of them. We have a call into Brody but haven’t reached him yet. Just to keep him apprised.”

“I think he’s away at a game.” It stung that they would call to alert Brody, but not think of me. But I deserved it. “Is it okay to bring Abby? She’s my friend’s daughter, and we were around the corner at the park, so I thought I’d drop in again.”

“Sure. Marlene was sleeping when we last checked in. But if she wakes up while you’re in there, she just might be a little more confused than usual.”

I explained to Abby on the walk down the hall that we were going to visit my grandmother, who sometimes got confused, but I didn’t want to scare her, so I left it at that. Cautiously, Abby and I entered Marlene’s room.

I breathed a sigh of relief when I found her sleeping peacefully. She didn’t wake up during the hour we sat there, but the nurses came in every fifteen minutes and checked her vitals and told us everything was fine. Eventually, Abby started to yawn. It was almost eight and probably close to her bedtime. So I said goodnight and left my cell phone number at the nursing station, asking them to call me if anything changed. Even though the nurse said they would, I didn’t put it past them to clear it with Brody first.

After we got back to our apartment building, I tucked Abby in at my place and told her to lock the door so I could go check out what was going on next door. The door to her apartment was unlocked—in this crappy neighborhood. That alone was enough to tell me there was no way I was sending Abby back to sleep there tonight.

Inside, I was relieved to find Lena sleeping alone in her bed. There was drug paraphernalia all over the place. On the way out, I grabbed a cell phone that was on the kitchen counter, hoping to find it unlocked and to see if there was anyone who could take Abby until things with her mother turned around. I knew from experience this wasn’t going to be a one-night thing.

Abby told me her grandmother’s name, and I went into the other room to call her. It definitely wasn’t the first time the woman had gotten a call about her daughter. There was no shock in her voice at all.

Sophie, Abby’s grandmother, only lived a few blocks over, so when she agreed to take Abby, I offered to bring Abby by. There was no reason she needed to see her daughter’s place the way it was.

The chilly November air felt good as I walked back toward my apartment. Sophie lived in a decent building, and she and her husband had invited me in for coffee. I’d stayed until I saw Abby was comfortable at their place. I couldn’t stop thinking about how Abby seemed so unaffected by being shuttled all over. Craziness had already become her norm. She just didn’t know that her life was crazy . . . yet.

A few blocks from my house, my phone buzzed in my pocket. A local number was flashing on my screen when I dug it out.

“Hello?”

“Ms. Garner?”

“Yes.”

“This is Shannon. I’m a nurse at Broadhollow Manor.”

I stopped on the street. “Is everything okay?”

“We just called an ambulance. Your grandmother’s stats are declining. Everything may be fine, but—”

“I’m on my way.”