“You might need stitches,” I said. Milford Hospital was only a minute away. “I can take you to the ER, let them have a look at it.”

“Oh man, no, you can’t do that to me. Then there’s going to be this whole sideshow, right? They might even call the cops because I’m not old enough to drink. There’ll be some big lecture, or they might even fucking charge me.”

“You need a big lecture,” I said.

Patty shot me a look. “You think I’m a loser, don’t you?”

“No,” I said. “But you make a lot of bad choices.”

“That’s supposed to make me feel better, right? That I’m not stupid, I make stupid choices. Well, if you make stupid choices all the time, doesn’t that make you stupid?”

“Who was that guy grabbing your arm?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Just some guy wanted me to blow him.”

When I reached Bridgeport Avenue, I turned in the direction of the hospital.

“I know where you’re going,” she said. “I won’t go in. And if you drive me home, I’ll just take off. Let me crash at your place tonight.”

It wasn’t a good idea. At the same time, I wasn’t about to let a teenage girl who’d had too much to drink wander off on her own. So I didn’t continue on to the hospital, and I didn’t ask Patty for directions to her mother’s house. Instead, I took her back to my place.

I parked and came around to Patty’s side. She had the door open and was getting out, but between the drinking and the banged-up knee, she was unsteady on her feet. She slipped an arm up over my shoulder and I led her across the drive and up the path to the front door.

I heard a car coming down the street. It slowed as it approached my house, as though the driver was intending to turn into my drive. It was a silver Ford Focus, and I was guessing that Kate Wood was behind the wheel.

She slowed long enough to get a good look at me half-carrying a young girl into my house. Then she hit the gas and kept going on up the street.

“Oh Christ,” I said.

“What?” asked Patty.

“Never mind. I’ll deal with it later.”

I took her upstairs to the bathroom Syd used and instructed her to kick off her shoes and sit on the edge of the tub with her feet inside. “Can you sit there without falling over?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” she said tiredly. “I can really hold my liquor.” There was a hint of pride there.

“I’ll get the first-aid kit.”

She was still perched on the edge of the tub when I came back, but she looked even younger than her seventeen years. In her bare feet, head hanging low, streaky, multicolored hair dangling in her eyes, with her knee scraped and bloodied, she looked like a little girl who’d fallen off her bike in the rain.

She looked up at me, her eyes moist.

“You okay?” I asked.

“I think about Sydney all the time,” she said.

“Me too.”

“All the time,” she said. Then, “What happened to your face?”

“I had a bad test drive with somebody,” I said.

“Wow. The car hit a tree or something?”

“Not exactly. Let’s worry right now about getting you patched up.”

Running some lukewarm water from the tap, I got down on my knees and managed to get Patty’s knee cleaned. Using some fresh white towels from under the counter, I gently blotted the wound. The towels quickly became stained with blood.

Next I applied some disinfectant, then some bandages.

“You’re good at this,” Patty said, leaning into me just slightly.

“I haven’t done a skinned knee in a long time,” I said. “The last time was when Syd was little and she had Rollerblades.”

Patty was quiet for a moment, sitting there, feet in the tub. I felt the weight of her body leaning into mine. When I was done with her wound, I lacked the energy to get up, so I sat on the floor, my body held up by the vanity.

“You’ve always been really decent to me,” Patty said.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” I said.

“Because I’m not like Sydney,” she said. “I’m not a good girl.”

“Patty.”

“I’m a bad girl. I do all the bad things.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You do bad things. But it doesn’t make you a bad kid.”

“We’re back to the bad-choices thing,” she said, mockingly.

“If you’re trying to convince me not to like you, it’s not going to work,” I said. “I think you’re a special person, Patty. You’re an original. But you haven’t got a lot longer to get your act together. You keep getting into shit like whatever that was tonight, and you’re going to run yourself off the rails permanently.”

She thought about that. “I know you look down on me.” I started to say something, but she held up a wobbly hand. “But you don’t do it in a way that makes me feel like I’m worthless.”

“You’re not worthless, Patty.”

“I feel that way sometimes.” Without looking at me, she said, “What if Sydney doesn’t come back?”

“I can’t let myself think about that, Patty,” I said. “Starting tomorrow, I’m going to spend all my time trying to find her.”

“What about your job?” she asked.

“I can always sell cars. I don’t know how much time I have to find Syd.”

Patty reached down to the floor for one of the damp, bloody towels, and used it to dry her feet before she swung them out of the tub.

“You need to call your mom and let her know where you are, that you’re okay,” I said.

A small smile crossed Patty’s face. “You think everybody’s family is like yours.”

“What do you mean?”

“You think all families care.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that.

“I know what it’s like for Sydney,” Patty said. “She acts like it’s a big pain in the ass, you guys calling her when she’s late, her checking in to let you know where she is, you looking out for her and all that shit. Sometimes, mostly when she’s with me, she acts like that stuff embarrasses her, but I think she just acts that way because she doesn’t want me to feel bad because nobody’s waiting up for me, wondering where I am, dragging me out of dumbass parties like that one I went to tonight, because no one gives a shit, you know?”

“I’m sorry.”

“My dad, one time-this was before I was six and he took off? He almost killed me.”

Maybe, when you’re already carrying a heavy burden, there’s always room for a little more. “What did he do?” I asked.

“It wasn’t usually his thing to take me to daycare, right? But this one day, my mom, she had this really early morning meeting to go to, so my dad had to drop me off, only he forgot, you know? I guess I was three, and I’m in the back, and I guess I fell asleep, and instead of going to daycare to drop me off, he just kept driving to work, and it was really hot out.”

“Oh no,” I said.

“So he went into work and it was like eighty degrees out but like a fucking million degrees in the car, and I guess when I woke up I was all dehydrated and shit, and my super-terrific dad didn’t remember I was out there until about two hours later. So he runs out and gets me out and runs me into the building and I’m totally like almost passed out and he gets me some water and makes me drink it and this is the thing, right, the first thing he says to me, and I can still remember this, even though I was three years old, he says to me, ‘Let’s not tell your mother about this.’”

I was slowly shaking my head.

“But she found out anyway, because just before my dad runs out, some lady saw me in the car and she wasn’t strong enough to smash in the window so she’d called the fire department. So everybody found out, my mom too, and that was the beginning of the end of their so-called marriage.”

“That’s an awful story,” I said.

“You know why I think he did it?” she asked.

I sighed. “It happens,” I said. “You just get into this kind of trance, you do the things you always do in the morning, and dropping you off was something different. He was on autopilot. I’m sure he never meant to do it.”

“Okay, maybe he didn’t mean to do it,” Patty said. “I mean, it wasn’t like he got up that morning and decided, hey, I think I’ll kill my little girl today. I know he didn’t actually do that. It was more like a subconscious thing. At this really dark level in his brain, he didn’t care what happened to me, because the son of a bitch isn’t even my real father.”