“She’s plighting her troth.” Neale dumps the sludge into the trash, washes her hands in the sink.

“Maybe.”

“Doesn’t it feel like she’s on a mission? Isn’t that a little scary?”

“No, no. I’m grateful she’s after me. I think she’s my best shot at making something more than another pile of tinder. Something to live in, not set fire to. All that wastable time I had? I used that up. I have to get down to business now. It’s not old age I worry about—I haven’t even gotten to that worry yet—it’s middle age. I don’t want to be in my fifties and in some lesbian sinkhole. Alone, obsessed with gluten. Accumulating cats. Old cats with health issues that keep me housebound with their medication schedules. Maureen is part of my new plan to keep that from happening.”

To herself, she calls this new plan Plan C. She didn’t really have a Plan A. Plan B was using her MFA to get a tenure-track teaching job. But by then she was doing sets for Adam Pryor and thought settling into academe would pull her off the artistic path. Now Adam is gone and Cate is broke. Drifting, but now into the reeds.

For a long time, her circumstances didn’t seem reduced in comparison to anyone else’s. Cate had a cohort of theater friends who were staying alive on a week-to-week basis. Everyone had fifty dollars in the bank. They made ten-dollar withdrawals from the ATM. At first she didn’t notice that their ranks were thinning. Somebody got married, then had twins. Somebody moved to L.A. for a movie and is now in a lot of movies. Her friend Brooke now heads up the theater department at a private school in Oak Park. Two guys who did excellent sets struck out on their own to become decorators, filling houses for wealthy clients on the North Shore—a more lucrative end of their trade. The friends came and went all along, but as time went on, more of them went than came. And many of the replacements were from a further subgeneration assembling their own cohort. By then Cate had spent the postdivorce remnant of her twenties pushing furniture around darkened stages, sleeping with the girls in backstage black, smoking dope, reading Victorian novels. Now even her thirties are behind her, a third of them spent on Dana in an underside life—freezer burn on her elbows, sleepless from 4 a.m. phone calls that might only last a few minutes but kept her awake through the rest of the night. All of which has landed her exactly here, in her early forties, standing on a hard patch of bare ground and clear horizons, trying to set off in some better direction.

Plan C attempts to find this direction via four main points: