“I don’t need someone taking care of me,” she said. “You think I’m a wreck. I know that. You think I can’t see it for myself?”

I took a deep breath. “I never said you couldn’t. I just thought—”

“I know,” she said. “You want to help.”

I stood and brushed the dust off my jeans. “Forget I ever said it.”

She patted the ground again. “Sit down already,” she said. “Sit down. I just need to know this one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Tell me you’re not doing it for my sake. And we’ll go. We’ll do it. You just tell me you’re not doing it for me.”

“Easy enough,” I said. “I do everything for myself.”

We called a cab and it dropped Tilly first. She’d stumbled twice on the pavement. I wanted to make sure she got up the stairs to her trailer. And she did, all three of them, without tripping. This was her home. She knew it drunk. This was probably how she knew it best.

The shower was running in our motel room. Tom hadn’t closed the bathroom door, and all the mirrors had thick beards of steam. “I’m back!” I yelled.

The plumbing went quiet—always a gathering sound to my ears, like the water was inhaling—and Tom emerged in boxers and a white shirt. He told me he’d taken a flashlight and run into the desert. Then he’d stopped and switched off his light. “It was dark as hell out there,” he said. “It was like another planet.”

“Neat,” I said. I waited.

“How was she?” he said. “How was it?”

“It was good.”

“Good.”

“Tom?”

“What?”

I told him about the move: my big idea. I told him about Tilly and her son and his big empty apartment—how he was lonely and she knew it, and she was killing herself and he knew it, and there was this crazy plan that maybe they could do it together, for a while, try to make what they’d never had when he was young.

I couldn’t stop talking. The more I talked, the more crazy and wonderful it seemed, this plan, so full of hope and absurdity. She was scared to start something new and so was I, truth be told, but I was even more scared to keep doing the same thing for years, trying to explain to other people why it didn’t make me happy.

When I was done, Tom asked, “Are you drunk?”

“You think it’s silly. You think it’s absolutely crazy.”

“You can’t be serious about this,” he said. “We met this woman yesterday.”

“She’s not a stranger.”

“But she is. Don’t you see? This isn’t even about her. You know that as well as I do.”

“What’s it about?”

“Come off it, Stella. You think Mom didn’t know how to be a mother, so you keep trying to play mommy with everyone else—the whole goddamn world, your own grandmother, and now—”

“This isn’t about Mom. It’s about me. This is my life.”