I opened my eyes. There she was, in the chair: with the orange. I was delighted. She was a nice thing to wake up from a more or less troubled sleep and find. I sat up on the couch, and yawned. I stood up and encountered myself in the mirror. I grimaced. My mouth tasted of sleep and cigarettes. She smiled, wanly, at the look I had given myself in the glass. I went into the kitchenette and rinsed my mouth and drank some water. She could hear the water splash in the metal sink.

I suppose that afternoon letting herself in, seeing me asleep, sitting in the chair, peeling the orange, examining herself in the mirror, dusk falling, the trees leafless, myself awakening, going to the kitchenette, rinsing my mouth, hearing water, she had asked herself if she looked troubled enough. If she looked pale enough. If eating the orange was the right touch. If I’d notice she wasn’t her usual self. Her gay, her light self. If I’d notice the calculated and desolate air.

I finally noticed.

I said: “What is it, darling? What’s the matter?”

Looking as she intended to look involved a certain darkening of the eyes. An effective hunching of the shoulders. It involved looking somehow small. And exceeding defenseless.

I crossed the room.

I said: “Something’s the matter,” and knelt beside the chair, to look into her great eyes. They looked as she intended them to look: beautiful and troubled.

She said nothing was the matter. Of course, I knew better. Something so evidently was the matter. She said she had no right to burden me with her difficulties. Difficulties, I insisted, were the only things to burden a friend with. And I was her friend. A little uncomfortable, kneeling there, but her friend. Dusk continued to fall. The trees became more disembodied in the park. She said, averting her head, that she would be all right in a little while, she was feeling, she said, just a little low. I took her hand. I am, as Michael might say, a hand-taker. Warm reassuring palm clasped to troubled palm.

I said: “Now, look. Something’s the matter. I know something’s the matter. Don’t be foolish. Tell me.”

A pause.

Sounding as she intended to sound, she said: “It’s my mother.”

“Is she ill?”

“Yes.”

“Very?”

“Enough.”

“What is it?”

“A tumor, I guess.”

“Isn’t the doctor sure?”

“That’s why he wants her to go to a hospital.”

“Well, send her.”

“On what?”

“Doesn’t she have medical insurance?”

“No.”

She picked at the orange in her lap.

“Don’t do that,” I said.

I took the orange away and held it in my hand.

I said: “How much money does your mother need?”

“Two hundred dollars,” she said.

She hadn’t moved. She didn’t look up. She seemed, I thought, frightened, a little frightened. She had looked just a little frightened, I thought, as she said “two hundred dollars.” I stood up. My knees ached; I wasn’t equipped for prolonged kneeling any more. My belt was still loosened and my pants hung a bit limp drearily folded over my stockinged ankles. Again I encountered myself in the mirror: my hair was much grayer when it was uncombed. I padded to the closet in the bedroom where my coat hung and took my checkbook from the inner breast pocket. I came back to the sitting room and went to the writing desk and sat down and started to write a check. I made it out for two hundred dollars and signed it.