Maureen is dressing up and taking herself to a big LGBT charity dinner dance. She wanted to take Cate, but Cate is still a long way off from dancing, even from dinnering. Maureen did not take this view, not at all. Apparently in her world New Year’s Eve is a big deal. She wouldn’t speak to Cate for three days. Finally she blinked. She’s coming by after the ball, or whatever. Her giving in, weirdly, disappointed Cate.

“I thought she’d be tougher,” Cate tells Neale, then, “I can see I’m starting to think of her as I don’t know, like a hobby. Which is so wrong. Because it’s clearly a bigger deal to her than that. I thought it was going to be a bigger deal to me, but that hasn’t happened. And now she wants to take care of me like I’m a wounded bird. She wants to feed me with a little eyedropper, nurse me back to who I used to be. But I’m not sure I can go back there.”

“This is about Dana, isn’t it? She’s back and wants to take care of you, too, doesn’t she? What’s the difference?”

“She doesn’t think I need recuperating. She thinks I did something important and that I’m a new, slightly better version of myself for having done it. She says—”

“What? She says what?”

“That she has to find a more important way to fuck me.”

“Ah,” Neale says.

Coming into the painting project, Neale is handicapped by her wrist. It’s still in a splint. She’s been told to do as little as possible with it.

Cate tells her, “You can still paint all the lower cabinets with your good paw. Just sit here on the floor. Start here. I can pour you more paint when you need it. Weird reversal, me being the one to lend a hand.”

“Ah, I don’t think you’re supposed to stand on the top part; that’s not even a step really,” Neale says. Cate is on the ladder to tape off a wall from the ceiling.

“Balance is my strong suit,” Cate says, then after a few minutes, “Does anything seem normal to you yet? I’m just checking in. Do we even seem normal to you—you and I? Doesn’t it seem like we’re in a play about our life? We have lines but they’re anodyne. It’s a quiet play. Like we’re in act two: ‘Painting the Kitchen.’ I say something. You say something back, but it’s too quiet around us. Right outside the theater, though, bombs are going off. Do you think we need to talk more about what happened—to dilute it, or wear it out, maybe?”