“Were. You and Granddad moved here a couple months ago. For me. And Dad and Uncle Daniel. Now you live here.” To Rose, this is not good news. To spare Mel’s feelings, she keeps that thought to herself.

“You’re a Buddhist, but you smoke and drink and eat meat,” Melanie adds.

“I guess I’m not a good Buddhist.” Rose thinks about that for a moment. A Buddhist. Things that didn’t make sense before don’t make sense now, but she accepts that. She slumps against the wall. For a while neither she nor Mel speaks. Both gaze silently into the candle flame.

“I smoke?” Rose bursts out.

“Not very much,” Mel says quickly. “Four cigarettes a day.”

“That’s right!” Rose says ecstatically. “I smoke! I remember that now.”

“Camel nonfilters,” Melanie says.

“Aha. I am a purist.”

Melanie puts her palms together, thumbs to chest. Solemnly, Rose does the same.

Bowing, Melanie intones, “Anything worth doing…”

Without thought, Rose finishes, “… is worth overdoing,” and bows back.

“You are so wise, Gigi Rinpoche,” Melanie says.

“It is so, Grasshopper,” Rose says. Both laugh, and in that moment Rose believes that all the stars in the firmament do not twinkle as beautifully as those in her granddaughter’s eyes.

“I think you should forget that you smoke,” Melanie says.

“Nope!” Rose replies. “I love smoking. Now that I have firsthand experience of living in a nursing home I may up my intake to four packs a day. Better my odds of dying before the proverbial hits the fan. At least free, I can choose my own drugs, and they won’t be mind-numbing. I can’t go back.”

“It’s okay, Gigi.”

“They were giving me something to make me seem demented.”

Leaning her chin on her hands, Melanie puffs out a long breath, making the candle flame dance erratically.

“What?” Rose asks again.

“You won’t like it,” Mel warns, shaking her head.

“Best get it over with,” Rose says. After the adventures of the last few days, she doesn’t think she can be more shaken than she is already.

Of course, she is wrong.

“It wasn’t just eccentricity—we’re all used to that. You started acting, you know, like, demented, long before Dad got you a place in Longwood,” Melanie says apologetically.

Rose feels as if she’s been trampled by gnus, not only because her theory of drug-induced insanity is smashed to smithereens, but also because it is so painfully obvious. Of course she was demented before she was put in the home. Had she not been, she would never have allowed it to happen. She would have hired a lawyer, called the police, flown back to New Orleans: all the things a sane person would do when faced with unwarranted influence in her life.