“The works. What do you feel like?”

I think about it. “How about 9 to 5? I could go for a little Dolly.”

She roots around the tapes, then holds one up triumphantly, singing the opening verse to the title song, shaking her hips in the worst Dolly Parton impersonation I’ve ever seen. I can’t help smiling. She pops it in the DVD player and tells me to move over. I scoot my bum so she can squeeze into the chair with me. We watch the credits roll as Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly all wake up to the same song my mom was singing. We smile and nod our heads. It’s the perfect fluff for me these days.

“How are you feeling?” she asks, not taking her eyes off the screen.

“Good,” I say. “Better.” She doesn’t ask better than when or in what way.

*   *   *

And somewhere during that day or another day, somewhere in that time we spend together, just the two of us again, we agree that it’s time to move. We pack up the movies and the curlers, shove everything into boxes and scrawl on the front of them. When we back out of the driveway, down our street and past Lottie’s house—the treehouse, and Martha the tree, and the screen door that I will hear bang shut in my dreams—I swallow hard but am okay. Some things you just can’t get back.

*   *   *

Mom found a townhouse in a nice neighborhood about forty-five minutes away. It’s actually not all that far from Dad, and he sent me a bunch of random emojis the day we moved in, mostly of food and balloons, but none to do with houses, which cracked me up. Mom set my equipment up for me, and she did a pretty good job. But she put all the movies in the family room because, she said, that’s where we’ll have our family movie nights. We started the night we moved in. I suggested Gremlins and dill pickle popcorn.

I know that Mom will meet someone else, and that it can’t always be the two of us forever, but for now it is, and it’s good. We go on walks together, and she sometimes reads the same books as I do, and we’ll talk about how much we liked them or didn’t. She doesn’t feel sorry for me or bring up what I did. We don’t talk about it. I know that she’s taken a break from social media, too; she said it was full of bitches, which I guess means she was getting some blowback. We are the same, but different. We try not to dig too deep; we just look ahead.