She also has a bunch of rubber bands that she keeps in a kitchen drawer. That’s all that’s in that drawer—a gigantic nest of rubber bands. Sometimes I stand outside Rose’s building and look up at all the windows, and I think, Whose apartment is the craziest? When I call Tiffany tonight to yell at her about not showing up, I’ll tell her to quietly get rid of a good third of those bags. After a while, you think about fire hazards.

“All set, Rose,” I say. “Let me give you your shot; then after a little while you can have some breakfast.”

She stands, stretches mightily, then shuffles over to her bed. She has a routine: She sits and squeezes her eyes shut, hands gripping her knees. Holds her breath, as though she were getting some whopping dose of penicillin rather than this mosquito bite of insulin. I inject her left thigh quickly, then tell her, “All done.”

“This time I didn’t even feel it!” she says, as she does every time.

“Right,” I say. And then, “Hey. Guess what I got us.”

“I saw. Milk and orange juice. And bananas.”

“No, not the groceries. Something else.”

“What?” She can’t decide whether to be suspicious or thrilled—too many times she’s been offered a bad deal like it’s a gift.

“Would you say you’re a gambling type, Rose?”

She smiles, looks down into her lap. “I don’t know.”

I pull two scratch-away betting cards from my jeans pocket. “Know what these are?”

“Coupons!”

“Nope. They’re betting cards. You scrape off the covering to see what numbers you have. You can win money.”

“From that card? You can get money?”

“Right. Your numbers just have to beat the dealer’s.”

“Oh. I pick one million.”

“No, Rose, you already have numbers. They give them to you, right on the card. We just have to look and see what they are.”

I hand her a card, and she peers closely at it. “I don’t see any numbers.”

“You have to take the covering off of them, remember?” I scratch at my card. “Look here. In this case, I got a seven and the dealer got a nine. So I lose.”

She looks at me, stricken.

“It’s okay. I have three more chances. But let’s see what you got.”

Together, we scratch away at Rose’s card. The bottom set of numbers shows the dealer with four and Rose with five. “You won!” I tell her. “See? You won five bucks!”

She laughs, claps her hands.

I uncover the rest of my numbers. “Uh-oh. I lost. But Rose, you won! See how lucky you are?”

She nods happily. “What can I buy?”

I look around her wreck of an apartment. Suddenly, the balloon deflates. “Well …”

“A new dish towel?” she asks.

“Yes!” I say. “Yes, I can get you a new dish towel.”