One of those homes had been Anna and Davey’s, and now it was just Davey inside with the doors locked and bed sheets blocking the windows. His mother’s medications were still stacked on the counter. Those were her clothes strewn across the living room, her microwaved jambalaya leftovers in the sink and her $8.75 liter of Heaven Hill Vodka pushed against the couch. Davey reached for the bottle and took a gulp. He chased it with water and then drank again.

“Last day,” he said. “Tomorrow it’s detox, getting a job, all that.”

The day before had also been the last day, and so had the weekend before that, and now it was two weeks until $350 in rent came due on the house. He had no money of his own and nowhere else to go. For the last five years he had been living with his mother and surviving on her disability payments and $197 in food stamps. She had supported him and he had been her caretaker, lifting her out of bed in the mornings and pushing her wheelchair up the hill to a tornado shelter whenever a storm hit. He had monitored her medications, washed her jaundiced skin and dealt with the diapers.

He had even tried to keep her from drinking, just as the doctors insisted. But he was buying vodka with her money and drinking it in front of her, and she would yell and beg and then threaten to withhold Davey’s cash so he couldn’t drink either. Eventually he had decided to compromise by rationing out her liquor, filling half of a pint glass with vodka that she could nurse through the night. But sometimes he would pass out on the couch or go to the bathroom, and whenever he came back the bottle looked emptier than before.

“Do you blame me?” he had asked Tiffany once, a day after the funeral.

“You did the best you could,” Tiffany had told him. “There’s no sense obsessing over it.”

Now the house was empty and there was nothing to do except reach back for the vodka and watch the same shows they’d always watched together: “Family Feud,” “Sleepy Hollow,” “Modern Family” and whatever else came through on the rabbit ear antenna. Day turned into night. Night turned back into day. He needed to shave, cut his hair and start putting in applications. “Last day,” he said again, rolling his own cigarette, reaching down for the bottle.

They had lived together for five years, and yet there were so many questions he had never asked her. Did she know she was dying? Was she scared? Was she ready? “I keep having these conversations in my head,” he said, and sometimes, as the days stretched on with no visitors, he would pick up his phone and call another relative to talk. “What happened? Was it my fault?” he would ask each time.

It was a choice, Tiffany said.

It was stress, Maryann said.

It was everything wearing her down, Junior said.

It was just the way it went, Candy said.

Davey sipped from the bottle. He gulped from the water. He lay back on the couch, where lately he had been having a recurring dream. He was sitting in the living room with his mother, a woman not yet 55 who had some color back in her cheeks and her hair pulled into a braid. He wanted to be honest with her, to tell her she was dying, and finally he blurted it out: You’re dying, he said, but she didn’t look back at him. You’re dying, he said again. You’re dying! But the TV was blaring, the bottle was in her hands, her eyes were glazed over, and she was too far gone to hear him.