You worry about her. About her restless Friday nights. You know she paces, searching for a drink to bring her that inner glow that says the weekend has arrived. You don’t understand this need. Some weekends she goes without, keeps the promise that she’ll cut back. Others she stays up til 4 A.M., a dance party for one in your living room, warming her soul with music and whiskey while you toss and turn in your bedroom, torn between her desire for escape and your need to protect her.

“At least I’m not like Mom,” she says the next day. And you nod your agreement. She’s not as lost as your mother. You don’t say what a low bar that is. But your sister wasn’t the one that took that ambulance ride, the one that was lectured by that doctor with the unibrow about how she needed to keep their mother out of the bottle one way or another. Your sister wasn’t the one who failed at that because it wasn’t her self-assigned job.

You drag her out at sunset, when the sky is an edible pink like grapefruit and the birds call out their goodnight songs. She will agree to go anywhere with you after another night of broken promises. You are driven to test the limits of that guilt.

You have no plan or destination. You just feel the need to move, to breathe fresh air, to drag her along behind you. Suddenly there is a dog darting past you as you come to an alley. It wears no collar and does not come when you call out, “Here puppy, puppy!” But it hesitates for a fraction of a second and you see something in its eyes, deep pools of chocolatey longing. It reminds you of something from your childhood, but you can’t quite place it. You never had a dog. But you want to take this one home and brush the mats out of its coat. You want to fill its belly until you can no longer see its ribcage pronounced like prison bars.

You decide you must follow it, and you drag your sister along with you. You can almost hear the crash of her regrets echoing through her skull.

The dog crosses a not so busy street and pads down the sidewalk toward a much busier one. You wish that you kept hot dogs in your pocket for emergencies such as this.

At the corner you screech, “STOP!” and the startled dog pauses to look back at you just as it’s about to step into the street. You close the gap and wrap your arms around the wayward canine. You look back at your sister.

“We saved him,” you say. But she’s still half a block away, ragged, unkempt. You cling to the dog, bury your face in its filthy fur and wait for her to catch up.