“Okay, Rose, I’m going to go to the store now. I’ll be right back. I’ll bring you some food, and then I’ll give you your insulin. While I’m gone, you get dressed. Can you do that?”

“I’ll get dressed. The bus for day care, I know. I’ll be ready.”

I check my watch, walk quickly back down the hall, thinking I’ll be late for DeWitt—I have to see Ann Peters and Fitz Walters before him. I’d call DeWitt—he’s the one patient who really gets mad if you’re not on time—but the last time I tried to let him know I’d be fifteen minutes late, I ended up being half an hour late because I spent so long standing at a pay phone listening to him carry on about my incompetence. “You fired!” he finally said. His grand finale. And I said, “No, DeWitt, I am not fired; I am simply late.” “Same thing!” he yelled, and hung up. And I went over and did his dressing anyway, and my punishment was that he did not speak to me.

• • •

By the time I bring Rose’s groceries back, she’s sitting at the little metal table in her kitchen wearing her favorite black dress. It’s a good forty years old, crepe, semiformal, with a once daring neckline now made modest by Rose wearing a man’s T-shirt beneath it. There is a rhinestone bouquet pinned at the shoulder, all the stones gone cloudy with age. Her battered black shoes are double-knotted, and she wears school-girl white socks with them. She has drawn on long, black eyebrows and applied a smear of her ancient coral-colored lipstick to her lower lip. Her open purse rests in her lap: inside, I see a balled-up hankie, a red plastic coin purse, and her apartment keys on a string. She used to always carry a framed picture of her mother, but the glass got scratched; so now she leaves it sitting on her dresser. Once I picked up that photo and stared into the clear eyes of Rose’s long dead mother, wondering if she could ever have imagined that this was how her baby girl would end up.

I put the groceries on the table, fold up the brown paper bag and then store it at the side of Rose’s refrigerator, as she likes me to do. Her supply of bags—plastic and paper, large size and small—is becoming overwhelming. “You could probably get rid of a few of these bags,” I say.

“Oh, no,” she says. “I need them.”

“Maybe not so many, though.”

“I need them.”