Vani: “And you? How’s it going with the vegetables?”

Compton laughs, the same tinkly ironic titter I thought was an affectation when we first met. “The vegetables all died, and I can’t bake worth shit,” she says. “Turns out I hate all that kitschy country crap.”

“So,” I say, “no sewing?”

“Fuck no. Everything I sewed looks like it was produced by a four-year-old. Which it was, because Rose took over all my projects when I abandoned them.”

“What about the insurance job?”

“I hate it,” she says. “It’s boring and un-doctor-y and I miss people. Even the drug seekers and the drunks and the frequent fliers and the hypochondriacs and the brawlers. It’s become clear to me I connect to them on some fundamental level that I’m never going to achieve with homeschool mommies and people who quilt and can their own vegetables. That was Ellis’s dream, not mine. The fuckups are my people.”

“So . . .”

“So,” she says, with a foxy grin, “I’m going back to the ER. Over in Danbury. I hired a country wench to come resuscitate the garden when it warms up, and she’s going to teach Rose and Lawrence and Walter to bake bread. I’ve got a standing date with Lawrence for a weekend in the city once a month, and when Rose and Walter are bigger, they’ll go too. So I think we’re all going to blend our natural state of being with our new state of being. We are still us, except we live in the boonies now.”

“Will you move back to the city?”

Compton loses the grin. “No,” she says. “No, never. I’m not gonna lie: I miss the culture. The food, the shops, the diversity. The pulse of the city. But even taking Lawrence back for a weekend feels like trying to revive the past in a city full of ghosts. I don’t want to move again either. Every other city seems like a feeble imitation of the original to me, and I’m not a second-best kind of gal. There’s something fulfilling and rewarding in challenging myself to accept a new way of life instead of seeking to re-create what I had before. That life is gone. I haven’t got the balance of our new life right yet, but I will.”

Hannah is dissolving at this speech, her makeup sliding in gray streaks down her face as she bats at her eyes. “Why did you tell us all this now, Compton?” she wails. “We still have to go back inside. Kira has to give her talk.”

“Kira’s not bawling,” points out Compton, although in truth I feel like bawling right alongside Hannah.

“Here, babe,” said Vani, handing Hannah a tissue.

“Oh, sweet little Lawrence,” burbles Hannah, her hand to her heart. She blows her nose, a great honking sound that startles some garden creature into flying from a nearby bush.