“Yeah. Still.” Sherri tried not to cry. “It’s just. I had to do everything for her. Literally everything.” Her mother had battled against a mysterious neurological disease that made her dizzy. The doctor called it cerebral atrophy—her cerebellum had turned into scrambled eggs. She had a sound mind, but her body slowly became a cage for it. As an only child, Sherri was the only person to care for her. The last year had been especially brutal. Her mother couldn’t even go to the bathroom without help. Though Sherri got along with her just fine, Muriel had been stubborn and strident even before she got sick. She had strong ideas about how things should be: music should be played at tempo, daughters should be obedient, and Muriel should be able to do all the things she used to be able to do.

“I had to watch her like a hawk,” Sherri said, thinking about the accident that led to her mother’s final decline, when she fell down the stairs. Sherri looked around the church. “She’s just nowhere. I know it sounds crazy, Roberta, but now that she doesn’t need me anymore, I’m all alone, and I’m—I’m useless.”

Sherri needed to vent, and aside from her friend Jeanne, there were very few people in her life she could confide in. Roberta, she felt, could absorb some of her emotions. “I can’t believe she’s really gone, even though I have a death certificate to prove it. The coroner typed out the technical term for the disease. I couldn’t even tell you what it is, but I counted. It was twenty-three horrible letters long.”

Roberta fixed Sherri’s collar and kept her hand on her shoulder. “Have you thought about what you’ll do next?” Roberta asked. “You can do anything now.”

Roberta was right: Sherri could walk right off a cliff if she wanted to. This new freedom she’d guiltily anticipated during her mother’s decline was at once frightening and exhilarating. Everything was changing. The people she’d gone to high school with had moved on to jobs or to college. She had the building on the square, she supposed, but she felt too young to be saddled with real estate. She couldn’t even afford to pay the taxes without someone to lease the space downstairs. It seemed everyone else had a plan, but what was Sherri supposed to do? She’d been so busy taking care of her mother these past few years that she’d never had the luxury of thinking much about her future. She was smart, but she had no money for college, and she didn’t know what she’d even major in. She knew one thing for certain: she didn’t want to become a nurse.