She was on Prozac now. “It’s a hard drug,” she said. “It takes something.”

It didn’t take everything. She was still an animated storyteller, full of tales about the people who commissioned her art pieces for their lofts and condos. She had a keen interest in other people and a sharp sense of humor whose edges, rising without warning, showed me how I must seem to other people, refracted and grinning like a clown. Once in a while she’d pause in the middle of an anecdote and stare off into the distance, as if scanning the horizon. Maybe she was waiting for the return of her disease or else another kind of trouble. There was this hope in her eyes, just a flicker.

The room around us was full of characters, local and foreign, like smudges brought to life from cartoon strips: hipsters with mullets, in suspenders; girls in leggings, their narrow wrists moving like flying fish through glittering glass bangles. A woman sat with two ferrets curled over her shoulders like parentheses. A man wedged a photograph of David Bowie into the V of his sweater-vest, where his chest hair grew thick and tangled, and asked me to take his picture. “Use my cell phone,” he said. “It has a camera.”

People spoke loudly because they wanted to be heard and overheard by strangers. One woman had gotten another knife commercial but she was worried this meant her hands were too butch. A man was DPing for a documentary about Monopoly buffs in Tennessee. A guy knew a friend of a friend who was making a feature-length about rabies. There were also a lot of people dancing. I liked that.

Alice liked to talk about my second life, up north. “Everyone I know is getting degrees or working,” she said. “But you’re really experiencing something.”

Alice complained about her lover, the one who smelled like European lovemaking, and his vanity complex about her art. “It’s like every canvas is a mirror,” she said. “He just sees himself.”

I saw: broth, robe, pills.

“Lame,” I said.

She said, “It’s not like every piece of art is about him.”

Most of her art probably was about him, or at least the idea of him. I said, “Really lame.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said. “But you use smaller words than you used to.”

Grandma Lucy had a small balcony, tucked between the balconies of finance bachelors, where she liked to sit at twilight, even during winter. Around dusk she got peaceful and confused. Doctors had a name for this. They called it sundowning.

“Dora ran an orphanage in Africa,” she said. “She helped build it. She broke her finger.”

“My mother helps African people, you mean,” I said. “With her law firm.”

A home-care nurse who’d started coming once a week explained about the twilight thing. “It happens with older folks,” she said. “They get confused. It’s like clockwork. Who knows why?”