I KNEW, EVEN AS I TOOK the test, that I was failing it. List below the hydroxybutanol structures that have R configurations. I’m not sure why I made myself stay the entire hour and a half. What spinning pattern in the H-nmr spectrum would you expect for H atoms colored green in the structures below? I probably could have walked out in the first fifteen minutes and gotten the same grade.

But I worked as well as I could through each question, calm and unhurried. Deep down, I had already accepted what was true. Two out of three wouldn’t make it to medical school, and I would be one of the two. But for that last hour and a half, I did my best, right up until the TA cleared her throat. Apparently, even though I wanted things to change, I still needed to be pushed from the ledge. I wasn’t ready to jump.

But the results would be the same. I put on my coat, handed in the test, and walked out into the cold morning. The sky was a bright, cloudless blue and the bells of the campanile were chiming. Across the street, two men on ladders used ropes to lift a giant Christmas wreath over the front doors of Strong Hall. The men did not speak to each other, but their movements seemed coordinated; the wreath slowly rose, perfectly centered. I found a bench and sat down to watch. I could do things like this now. It was over. There was nothing to cram for, no deadline looming over me. I didn’t have anywhere I needed to be.

And so the ache in my chest returned. During the exam, and only during the exam, I had been free of the heavy sadness that I’d gone to bed with the night before. Now, again, I had nothing to distract me. The bench was concrete, and the longer I sat there, the colder I felt. But I didn’t get up. The wreath turned blurry in my eyes, and I pulled my hat down low on my head.

“So how’d it go?”

I looked up. Tim stood in front of me, no coat, just the same sweater he’d been wearing the night before, his hands in the front pockets of his jeans. I started to smile, but the expression on his face stopped me. His dark hair was combed, his chin cleanly shaved, but I could tell, just looking at his eyes, that he hadn’t slept.

“I was at the library.” He nodded behind him. “I saw you over here. I just thought I’d come over and see how it went. The test, I mean.”

I shook my head. I hated that I was the reason he looked so tired and sad. If I reached out, or even tried to go near him, he would stop me—I could tell. But he kept looking at me, waiting. He really did want to know about the test.

“I failed it,” I said.

He shook his head. “I’m sure it wasn’t as—”

“No. I did. I really did. But I’m fine with it. I don’t care.” I looked at the sidewalk by his feet and focused on not crying. If I did, he would feel sorry for me, and that wasn’t right. I tried to pretend I was yawning.

He shifted his weight and crossed his arms. He gestured for me to scoot over. He sat on the bench, as far away from me as possible, and started rooting around in his book bag. He took out a calculator, another calculator, a book titled Thermofluid Systems, a can of Coke, the Sports section from some newspaper, and an orange. “I thought I might have some Kleenex,” he said. “I had that cold a couple of weeks ago.”

I smiled, wiping my cheeks with the back of my mitten. “Thanks for checking,” I said. I looked away from him, out across the street. The wreath was up above the doors now. The workmen stood below, looking up, one of them pointing at the red bow.

“If you didn’t want to move in with me, you could have said so.” Tim looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “If that really was the problem.”

I nodded, still looking at the wreath. This time last year, my parents were married. I was getting ready to go home for Winter Break. The Roofer was maybe already on the scene, but I didn’t know it yet. On Christmas Day, my family opened presents in the morning, and we ate turkey at the dining room table, and then we walked to Mr. Wansing’s for the neighborhood pie party, just like we did every year. When we were little, it was the Wansings, the husband and the wife. Mrs. Wansing died when I was in third grade, but I have a clear memory of her carefully getting down on her knees to look me in the eye and ask, very seriously, if I wanted pumpkin or pecan. After she died, my mother hadn’t thought that Mr. Wansing would keep inviting everyone over. He did, though. He bought pies at the store, and they weren’t as good as the ones that she had baked, but everything else was the same. He set out polished silverware and whipped toppings the exact way that she had done. He also put a framed picture of her on the big table where all the pies were, so it seemed like she was gazing out over them, smiling at their familiar guests.

And just last year, we had all gone: my mother and my father, Elise and Charlie, and me. I hadn’t thought much about it. I hadn’t known it would be the last year, how much everything was about to change.

Tim rested his elbows on his knees. Even with his knees bent, his long legs stuck out far from the bench. A man walked by, and he pulled them in. “I was just asking,” he said. “I wanted to help you. You hate your job, right? I was trying to help.”

“I know,” I said.

He rolled his eyes. “Okay. That’s not completely true. I wanted you to move in. For me.”

“But you wanted to help me, too. I know you did.”

He gave me a long, appraising look. His gaze moved from one of my eyes to the other, and his mouth did something close to a smile. “I forget you’re younger.” He looked unhappy again. “It makes a difference, I guess.”

I nodded. Despite popular belief, it wasn’t always so great to be both young and in love. And yet, even at that moment, I had to sit on my hands to keep them from going to him. It felt like a physical pull.

We sat on the bench for a while, not speaking. Someone walked up and gave each of us a flyer for a garage sale.

He rubbed his eyes and looked up at me. “So what do you want, Veronica? You want to date around? You want to see other guys and then get back together? I’m not going to do that. I can tell you that right now.”

“No. That’s not what I want.”

“Then what? Do you know?” He pointed at himself. “Because I do.” The tops of his ears were pink, maybe from the cold, maybe not. He squinted up at the sky. “Eventually…I want what my parents have. That’s not a terrible thing. They’re pretty happy. Okay? I know you’re cynical right now. But sometimes it all works out. You would know that if you’d ever met them.”

This was probably true. Two stories about Tim’s parents stood out in my mind. The first was that before Tim’s eldest brother was born, his mother had been in a car accident that burned her left arm and some of her neck so badly that she was in the hospital for months, and Tim’s father had stayed with her every moment that he could, reading to her or just sitting there with her so she would know she wasn’t alone. The second story was that just last year, the two of them had been asked to leave a movie theater because they were laughing too much at a movie that wasn’t supposed to be funny.

“I wish I’d met them,” I said, only because it was true. He turned and looked at me, mad.

“Why?” he asked. “What’s the point? Just curiosity?”

I shook my head, as if that were a reasonable answer. He waited.

“I want…” I rubbed my eyes, trying to think. “I want to be with you, but…” But what? I didn’t have the word for it. It was the feeling of being in the semi, all those exits rolling by. “It would be so easy to move in with you. It’s what I want. But it might not be good for me.” Even as I said this, I heard how cold the words sounded, and I hoped he would hear in my voice that I didn’t mean them coldly at all. “I meant everything I said last night. It was just a dumb thing I did. I still want to be with you.” I reached across the bench and tugged on the sleeve of his sweater. I let my hand rest there on his sleeve, and he didn’t pull away for a while.

But eventually, he did. He was quiet as he packed his things back into his bag. When he finally started to speak, I thought I was going to get an answer one way or the other. But he only looked up at the blue sky and said that the weather was supposed to turn again and that it might snow. I closed my eyes.

“Look,” he said, standing up. “I don’t know what I think. I need some time.”

I opened my eyes, surprised. He must have seen it, because he shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said firmly. “I don’t know what I’m going to do yet.”

I nodded somberly. I understood what he meant. But I was still hopeful. Really, the fact that he was just thinking it over was as good an assurance as any. When did anyone ever really know what they were going to do? People who had been married for decades broke promises to themselves and to each other, good intentions or not. That was the way it was with love. You had to have a contingency plan, or be ready to come up with one quickly. No matter what he decided this week, he could, at any time in the future, change his mind.

 

When I got back to the dorm, I opened the door to my room to find my mother sitting next to Bowzer on the floor, or rather, on newspapers spread flat all over my floor, with a large bucket of sand in front of her. A dark-haired girl in a pink hoodie sat on her right. Gretchen sat on my mother’s left. Three other girls who looked vaguely familiar completed the circle around the bucket. Everyone was taking turns scooping out handfuls of sand and dropping them into small paper bags.

Bowzer noticed me first. He wiggled the stump of his tail and struggled to his feet. A little pee dribbled out of him, forming a puddle on the linoleum.

My mother looked up. “Oh, hey, honey. How was the test?” She followed my eyes to Bowzer. “Whoops,” she said, standing up. “I’ll get that. It’s just a little. I’ve got wipes in my purse.”

“Hey, Veronica.” Gretchen waved. She looked comfortable, relaxed, as if she had been sitting there for a while. She had also taken the chemistry test that morning. We had caught the same bus and walked into the exam room together. But, of course, she had finished early. “I just came down here to get you for lunch,” she said, shaking out a new paper bag. “And I walked in on this good time.”

I looked down at Bowzer. I looked back at my mother. She’d already dabbed up the pee with one wipe and was now using another to go over the floor.

“Oh,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.” She tossed both wipes into the garbage and used another to go over her hands. “I explained the situation. They all like dogs. It’s fine.”

Everyone looked up, nodding in agreement. I took a step back, and tried to think where I should put my bag. I’d never had so many people in my room.

“We’re making luminarias,” my mother said. She air-dried her hands above her head. “For Christmas. Or I call them luminarias. What did you call them again, Inez?”

“Farolitos.” The dark-haired girl looked up and smiled. “They’ll look really good if it snows.” She shrugged. “They’ll look good anyway.”

Inez. Unless there were two girls named Inez on my floor, she was Inez from Albuquerque, the first person from Albuquerque my mother had ever met. She wore silver hoop earrings, large enough for the bottoms to graze her shoulders, and her hair was shiny black and very straight.

“It’s just candles, bags, and sand.” My mother nodded at Inez, smiled, and then looked back at me. “You missed the run to Hobby Lobby.” She lowered herself to the floor again. “Have a seat, honey. You should make a couple. You just put enough sand in the bag to weight it down, then nestle a candle in. It’s relaxing.” She looked up again. “How was the test?”

I shook my head. My gaze moved over the pile of votive candlles in the corner.

“Where are you going to put them?” I asked. My voice, in itself, was a wet blanket. And what was I worried about? Really, we already had a dog in the room. Why not a dog and a fire?

“Outside,” Inez said.

“Where outside?”

“Right outside. In front of the dorm. It’ll look pretty, for once.”

I caught Gretchen’s eye. She looked back at me, frowning. She stopped filling her bag with sand. “Shit,” she said. “You’re right.”

My mother picked up another handful of sand. “Right about what?”

“I don’t know if they’ll let us do it,” I said. “Not on the property. Candles are pretty much banned.”

“It’s not a fire hazard,” Inez said. She gave me a hard look, her chin jutting up. “That’s stupid. Everyone does this back home.”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t pretend to know anything about luminarias, and I’d never even been to Albuquerque. I only knew the dorm’s fire code was strict. “We can try to put them outside,” I said. “We could see if anyone says anything.”

“Forget it.” Inez leaned back on her hands and looked at a spot of newspaper on the floor. “I hate it here. It’s stupid to even try.” She looked up and out the window. Her brown eyes glistened, but her face was perfectly composed. “I can’t wait for break. The second I finish my last final, I’m gone. I’m in my car. I’m going home.”

I looked at the floor, and then back at her face. Here was someone who hated the dorm as much as I did, or more than I did. And this someone was younger than I was, and, in so many ways, farther away from home. I’d thought I had it so hard, being a little older than everyone else.

“Let’s just keep making them,” my mother said. Her own hands never stopped moving. “I don’t know what else we can do with all this sand.” She reached for another paper bag. “We’ll figure out what to do with them later.”

I had heard this line from her many times. Over the years, on cold afternoons and in Girl Scout meetings, whoever was under my mother’s care had been encouraged to make more cookies than anyone could eat, more ornaments than anyone could hang, and more candle holders than anyone could possibly want. And if our creations burned, broke, or just looked stupid—no big deal. It was all about the making for my mother. She was never that concerned with the end result.

But Inez was listless as she dropped handfuls of sand into a bag, and the look on her face made it clear that she was only continuing to be polite to my mother. We worked without speaking. I could hear the sound of sand falling, the paper bags crinkling. Gretchen shifted and sighed.

My mother nudged me. “Do you have any holiday music?”

I looked up from my paper bag. “Do I have any holiday music?”

She nodded.

I shook my head. She seemed surprised, but no I didn’t have any holiday music. I was a junior in college. I lived, essentially, in a high-ceilinged box. But she seemed disappointed, as if, after all these years, I had finally admitted that despite all her years of careful teaching, I didn’t write thank-you notes, or wash my hands after using the bathroom. My mother had a lot of holiday music. Her favorites were Handel’s Messiah and an album that ended with Judy Garland’s sad voice singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” I’d heard all that and more played over and over every December of my childhood. Her music was maybe packed in a cardboard box now, probably out in the van.

A girl across the room raised a sandy hand. “I have Jingle Cats.”

We all looked at her. She was pretty, with long, curly red hair. She smiled, revealing braces.

“You know, the cats that sing? They’re real cats. Meowy Christmas?” She looked back at all of us, incredulous. “Oh my God. You don’t know it? My whole family loves it. And we’re Jewish.” She shrugged, shaking a bag full of sand. “They do ‘Hava Nagila,’ too.”

The cats helped quite a bit. I put the CD in my little player, and almost right from the start it was funny. It wasn’t so funny that you would die laughing, but it was hard to listen to and keep a straight face. By the end of “Silent Night,” even Inez had cracked a smile. We all kept working, filling the bags with sand, which felt smooth and soothing in my hands. I felt as if I were decompressing, some hidden muscle in me finally relaxed. We were all quiet for a while, and there was only the sound of the cats and the music and sometimes some of us laughing.

Of course, I thought of who would love this, who should’ve been in the room. I touched my mother’s arm. “Did you ask Marley?” I whispered.

She nodded without looking at me.

“Is she in her room?”

She nodded again. She still didn’t look at me. But when I stood up, shaking sand off my hands, she reached above my boot and squeezed my knee.

 

The gray carpet in front of Marley’s room already looked a little more faded than it did in the rest of the hallway—it was the only section that regularly got sunlight. She almost always left her door open when she was home—a steady, hopeful invitation to anyone walking by. Or almost anyone. From the hallway, I could see just the tip of one of her pig slippers on the floor. I hid behind the wall when I knocked.

“Come in.”

I moved quickly to the interior of the room. As soon as she saw me, she looked back down at her work.

“What do you want?” she asked.

She was sitting at her desk, or what I assumed was her desk—the room was clearly divided in two. The bed behind me was as neatly made up as a store display, with a floral dust ruffle that matched the sham pillows. Sorority letters, painted blue with tiny daisies, hung on the wall overhead. On the bureau sat several framed pictures of tan, smiling girls in formal dresses, their heads resting on each other’s shoulder, their arms almost always interwined. I squinted at each picture, trying to pick out Marley’s roommate. It wasn’t all my fault that I couldn’t do it. She really wasn’t ever around.

The other bed was unmade. The quilt that Marley always dragged out to the lobby was twisted across the bed, and a pillow, with a pillowcase that did not match anything, had fallen to the floor. In the corner of the room, wadded up on the floor, was the flowered dress she’d been wearing when I yelled at her. The French horn lay at the foot of the bed, looking beautiful and complicated with all its swirling tubes.

“What do you want?”

My gaze moved over her bulletin board. She’d tacked up a postcard of a boy with a french fry in his nose, and another of a ferret getting a bath. She had a large black-and-white poster of a man in a bow tie blowing into a French horn, but even that was just taped to the wall. There was only one framed picture, and it was on her desk. A woman in black glasses sat at a piano, with a little smiling girl next to her on the bench. I bent over and squinted to get a better look.

“Is that you?” I asked. “Is that you and your mom?”

She picked up the picture and turned it so I could no longer see the front. “Don’t come in here and ask me things. Don’t come in and ask about my mom. You’ve never even been in my room before.” She looked up again. “What do you want?” she asked. “For the last time. I’m busy. Obviously.”

I stood on my toes to see what she was working on. Sheet music was scattered across her desk, her own handwriting scrawled above and below and beside all the rows of notes. I don’t know why this struck me as strange. I had an idea of people who played instruments just sort of magically picking them up and playing them. I knew they must practice. But I didn’t think of them as studying music, thinking about it, the way I might think about a book.

“Will you please come down to my room?” I started to sit on her roommate’s bed, but then thought maybe I shouldn’t. “We’re making luminarias. You already know that. You should come down, Marley.” I ducked, trying to catch her eye. “Please? I really wish you would.”

“I’m never going in your room again.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She looked up. Her nostrils were flared, and her eyes were blank with sadness. I understood then how much I had hurt her, and also how much she was already hurt.

“I appreciate that. Now please go.”

I held up one finger, trying to think. Just that morning, during the exam, I had struggled to come up with solutions to one problem after another. I had gotten most of them wrong. But not all of them. I tried to think.

“What if I leave?” I asked. “What if I go right now, and I promise not to come back for several hours? I mean, it’s me that’s the problem, not the room. Right?”

Headway. She lifted her eyebrows. “That would work,” she said.

I told her I just needed a few minutes to get my things. Baby steps, I told myself. She wouldn’t forgive me all at once. And that wasn’t the point anyway. She needed the company more than I did, and I at least owed her that.

Back in my room, I grabbed my bag and my coat and my keys and announced, to no one in particular, that I had to leave for a while, and that Marley would be coming down. My mother and Gretchen watched me move around, but neither of them said anything. I didn’t know where I would go, what I would do with the afternoon.

Before I actually left the dorm, I stopped by Gordon Goodman’s office. He frowned when I used the words “candle” and “paper bag” in the same sentence. But when I told him about Inez, and how homesick she seemed, he scratched his chin and looked thoughtful.

“Tonight?” he asked. “You want to put them out tonight?”

“Tonight would be best,” I said. If we had to fill out forms and wait a week, Inez would be right: where we lived would not feel like our home.

“I’ll make some calls,” he said. “Come on in and sit down.”

He had a tall stack of papers and a calculator on his desk, but he moved both to the side. I said I could make the calls myself if he told me who to call and gave me the numbers. He seemed pleased that I offered, but he waved me off. Housing would want to talk to him, he said. And he was already on a first name basis with almost everyone at the fire department, because of all the stupid false alarms.

“I think it’s great that you’re doing this,” he said, the phone tucked between his head and shoulder. His smile was so approving that I felt guilty. He thought the idea had been mine. I couldn’t tell him that my mother was the one who had organized everything, or that after two days, she was doing my job far better than I had in four months. All I could do was sit there and look grateful as he made four phone calls and spent a total of twenty-five minutes on hold.

I was grateful, and also, despite my misrepresentation, encouraged. Some people would always go out of their way to help, once they saw that you were really trying.

 

When we got approval, I texted Gretchen: they could put the luminarias out that night. I suppose I could have called, and maybe heard a group reaction to the news. But by the time I walked out of Gordon’s office and past the beeping video games in the lobby and out into the afternoon, I felt so awake and calm in my own head that I didn’t want to talk at all. The sky was still clear, the air cold, but I felt fine once I started walking.

The bookstore gave me two options: I could get cash back for my chemistry book, 30 percent of what I paid for it, or I could get 40 percent in trade. I picked out a used copy of Middlemarch, some gum, an organic peanut butter dog treat shaped like a candy cane, and a red knit scarf on clearance.

“You sure you don’t want to keep it?” the cashier asked. He touched the cover of the chemistry book. “You look a little sad to see it go.”

I wouldn’t have said I was sad. But I understood what I was doing. At that moment, I was no longer thinking about quitting or even deciding to quit; I was actually quitting. And it was hard to look at that brick of a book and not think of all the long days and nights I had spent with it, trying harder than I’d ever tried at anything in my life. And now all that work, all that trying and worrying, was for nothing. I had failed.

The Union was decked out for the holidays, too. There were blinking lights and large banners wishing all of us a happy Christmas, Kwanzaa, and Hanukkah. I used the change from the bookstore to buy coffee and some pistachio nuts. I found an empty armchair that faced a window big enough for me to see much of the sky, the first clouds of the probable snow hovering on the western horizon. I looked at my watch. I’d told Marley I would be gone for several hours, and I hadn’t been gone for forty-five minutes. I crossed my legs. I uncrossed them. I crossed them again. I looked out at the sky. Whenever my father had taken his rare breaks from work, for holidays and family vacations, he often moved this way, jittery and anxious, unsure what to do with himself.

But I just needed to get used to it. For the rest of the afternoon, I read. Middlemarch was as thick as my chemistry book, but I turned the thin pages easily. I’d watched the movie of it with my mother and Elise two summers ago, right before Elise’s wedding. We’d all been horrified when Dorothea married the old, unfeeling man, and we felt bad for her once she realized what a mistake she’d made. At the next commercial, Elise clicked her tongue. “No divorce back then. She’s screwed. This is sad.” But my mother had already read the book, and she told Elise to just wait. Sure enough, almost as soon as the movie came back on, good luck—and that’s all it was, really—the creepy old husband died.

When the credits rolled, Elise clapped. “So she gets to be happy at the end. Aww. Nice.” She clasped her hands beside her head. I was still thinking of the last line. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts. There was more, but I’d already forgotten it.

My mother got up from the couch to stretch. “I don’t know if I’d say she’s happy.” She’d looked at the stairs, her brow furrowed. My father had already gone to bed. “You should read the book,” she said.

And so I did, for almost that entire, cold afternoon, sitting there in the Union. Even from the start, there was so much the movie had skipped over. Since they could remember, there had been a mixture of criticism and awe in the attitude of Celia’s mind toward her elder sister. The younger had always worn a yoke; but is there any yoked creature without its private opinions? I underlined sentences, dog-eared pages. Here is a mine of truth, which, however vigorously it may be worked, is likely to outlast our coal. When I looked up, the setting sun was bright in my eyes. The sky was clear, with just a few wispy clouds edged in orange and red. It hadn’t snowed yet, and maybe it wouldn’t.

But Inez was right. I could see that as soon as I turned the last corner of my walk home. Even on dead grass and soggy ground, the luminarias were beautiful, perhaps because there were so many, all of them flickering in swirling patterns and lining the sidewalks around the dorm. A few people were out walking around them, quiet; and above me, in hundreds of windows, faces pressed against dark glass, so many hands cupped around eyes, looking down.

 

The fire alarm went off before dawn. My mother groped her way to my bed and grabbed my arm in the darkness.

“It’s okay.” I yawned before I opened my eyes. I sat up slowly and turned on my lamp. “It’s just an alarm. We have them all the time.”

I had to repeat all this twice. The alarm was so loud that even Bowzer could hear it; he was at her feet, trembling, and he looked as if he were trying to burrow into her shins, to work a hole right through her leggings and skin.

I held him back as she pulled on her boots, and she held him as I put on mine. In less than a minute, we were ready to go, with Bowzer buttoned under my mother’s coat. Before I opened the door, she looped her arm around mine.

“I love you,” she said. She looked at the floor. She wasn’t kidding around. “I want you to know that. Okay? I think you’re pretty great.”

“Mom.” I leaned toward her. “I love you, too. But really. It’s just an alarm.”

Out in the hallway, which was not, in fact, full of smoke, my mother walked slowly, with her chin lowered to keep Bowzer’s head pushed down. All around us, doors were opening. Girls in pajamas stepped into the hallway swearing, their hands clapped over their ears.

“I need to go on ahead,” I yelled. The alarms were louder in the hallway. “You should go find Marley, and have her wait with you. She doesn’t have a car.”

Just as we passed Marley’s door, it opened. My mother turned back to me briefly. Both of her hands were occupied, so she sent me on with a nod of her head.

 

So it was Marley who was with her on the way down the stairs, and it was Marley who would tell me later how Bowzer popped his head out of my mother’s coat just as they were filing out the double doors. The security monitor, Marley said, was meaner than he’d needed to be. She didn’t know his name—it was the one with the pierced nose and the pretty girlfriend. My mother seemed to know him. He tried to take the dog. She wouldn’t let him. He told her she couldn’t leave, and that she had to come with him. And he kept calling her Mom.

Marley was surpised by what my mother did next, though when I heard, I wasn’t. She’d become fearless, but she wasn’t a fool. When Jimmy put his big hand on her elbow, she did what any middle-aged stowaway who had recently gone through Strength Camp might at least attempt when holding an elderly dog and confronted by vindicitive dorm security. She pointed over his shoulder, slipped into the crowd, and ran.

 

Gordon Goodman rubbed his eyes, one elbow propped on his desk. His white T-shirt was on backward, the tag sticking up under his chin.

“You can’t have dogs in the dorm,” he said. He turned and looked out his window, squinting at the rising sun. Just a half hour earlier, the fire trucks, unneeded once again, had turned off their lights and rolled away. I wondered if, on mornings like this, he regretted abandoning law.

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

He looked back at me, annoyed. We both knew he wasn’t chastising me. He was just talking to himself, trying to sort through the problem. I’d already told him about my mother getting kicked out of her apartment, having nowhere to go.

Unfortunately, accidentally, I’d also told Jimmy Liff. He was on the other side of the interior window, pretending to fill out paperwork behind the front desk. Or maybe he really was filling out paperwork—on me and my mother. He stood just on the other side of the window, his head lowered, the top of his skullcap almost touching the glass. When I noticed him there, he looked up and smiled. I knew he’d heard every word.

Gordon tugged on his beard. “You don’t have any relatives in the area?”

I shook my head.

“Any friends? Anyone she can stay with?”

“I think she’s embarrassed. And it’s hard, because of the dog.”

On the other side of the window, Jimmy pouted. It was over the top. It was like he was making fun of himself, for just how much of a jerk he could be. Gordon saw my face change and followed my gaze. He stood, opened the door, and told Jimmy that he could finish up whatever he was working on later. His voice was stern, and that was a little vindicating, but not much. I didn’t care what Jimmy Liff thought about anything, and I doubted my mother did either. But I hated that he looked so pleased, keeping his eyes on mine as he sauntered past the window one last time.

As soon as he was gone, I started begging. I told Gordon my mother would only need to stay a few more days, and that Bowzer wasn’t bothering anyone. No one had complained. And it was my mother who had organized the luminarias. She was the one who drove everyone to the store for the bags and candles. She was doing my job better than I was.

Gordon raised his eyebrows. For a moment, I thought I had him. Of course he would relent. My mother was too nice of a person to have to sleep in a van.

But he shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “She can’t stay, not with the dog.” He frowned. He felt the tag under his chin, looked down, and tucked it back in his shirt. “Does she have anywhere to go tonight?”

“I don’t know.” I stood up slowly. My own head felt heavy on my shoulders. He was looking at his bookcase, at one of his glazed bowls.

“I’d like her to come back and talk to me. You think you can get her to do that? She’s not in any trouble, okay? I just want to help.”

“I’ll ask her,” I said. He was being polite. I kept moving to the door.

“Veronica!”

I turned around. He was on his feet.

“Are you going to talk to her today? Does she have a phone? Is there some way you can reach her?”

I nodded, though the answer to the last two questions was no.

She did call later that morning, from a pay phone outside a grocery store. But she didn’t want to go talk to Gordon. No, she said, she wasn’t scared of Jimmy. She hadn’t appreciated him cornering her like that, telling her where she had to go. But she didn’t care if he was around or not. She said she just felt bad about causing so much trouble for me. She sounded tired, but not particularly upset. “I’ll come get the rest of my things later,” she said. “I’ll be fine, honey. Really. I just don’t want to bother you for a while.”

But I pleaded. I insisted. I told her it wouldn’t take long, and that I would wait with Bowzer in the van. When none of that worked, I told her the real reason I needed her to come in was that I was about to get fired for keeping a dog in my room, and that I needed her to confirm my story, so my boss might give me another chance. I made my voice sufficiently righteous and whiny. It was for her own good, I told myself. Once Gordon met my mother, he could not possibly expect her to sleep in a van. She would charm him. He would understand that she didn’t deserve any of this, even if she wouldn’t get rid of the dog. He would bend the rules, and let her stay.

 

I was wrong. Twenty minutes after my mother walked into the dorm, she came back out to the van with a handwritten list of social service agencies and homeless shelters. Bowzer strained against my arm, trembling in his excitement over her return. As soon as she closed her door, I let him go, and he lunged, falling between her lap and the steering wheel.

“That’s how he thought he would help?” I snatched the paper out of her hands. My eyes moved over words: “shelter,” “crisis,” “homeless,” “emergency.” He’d neatly written out phone numbers and hours and rules. By one listing, he’d added, “Ask for Carla, re: gas voucher.”

“I though it was pretty nice of him.” She took off her hat and put it on the dashboard. “It’s not his problem. But you wouldn’t have known that, talking to him.” She took the list back from me and studied it. She didn’t look that bad, considering she hadn’t gotten a shower that morning and she’d spent most of the day in the van. She was wearing the scarf I’d given her. In the sunlight coming through the windows, it looked itchy, made with cheap yarn. And the red was too bright for her face.

“He gave me some career advice, too.” She looked up at me, smiling.

I waited, but she waved me off.

“What? What did he say?”

“Later. Maybe.” She kept looking at the list. “None of these places take dogs.”

“Mom. That doesn’t matter. You’re not going to a shelter.”

She started to say something, but when she saw my face, she stopped smiling, and all at once, she looked as if the skin of her face had suddenly grown heavy. She put her hand over her eyes and turned away.

“Mom. Let me call Elise.”

She shook her head. She still had her hand over her eyes, her elbow resting on the steering wheel. Bowzer sighed in her lap, content.

“Then let me call Dad. I won’t even mention you. I’ll say I need the money. I’ll make something up. I’ll—”

She put her hand on my knee. “Please stop talking,” she said. “Please? I just need you to be quiet for a moment. I have a little dignity left, and I’d like to keep it. I’ll think of something else if you just give me a minute. Okay? I’ll come up with something else.”

I gave her a minute. And then two. And then five. And then ten. She didn’t speak, and neither did I. I looked out the window, up at the sky, which was soft and gray this morning, though there was still no sign of snow. Tim. I could call Tim, and ask him to take the dog. My mother could stay with me. But I couldn’t call him. Just a few days after Third Floor Clyde did not seem like the best time to ask him to take care of my mother’s slightly incontinent dog. You couldn’t push someone away and then lean on them. And although my mother was quiet, no ideas yet, I knew that if she knew everything, she wouldn’t want me to ask him.

Also, I thought that if I waited long enough, she would give in. She would let me call Elise or lie to my father. She would realize there wasn’t another option.

But she didn’t give in. I don’t know how much time passed. It got cold in the van. She sat with one hand on Bowzer’s back and the other tapping the steering wheel. Her eyes squinted across the parking lot, though there wasn’t anything to see. We might have sat there all day, the two of us. As time passed, that seemed more and more likely. I wasn’t going to leave her there in the parking lot. And yet, despite her refusal to admit it, there really was nowhere for her—for them, at least—to go.

And then, there was.

Our salvation came in the unexpected form—and the very unusual sight—of Haylie Butterfield getting off a bus on the other side of the parking lot. It took me a moment to recognize her—not because of the dark hair, which I’d gotten used to—but because for the last five months, I’d only seen her transported in Jimmy’s car—she never rode the bus. She was also wearing running shoes. She had on the shiny red coat and a long black skirt, and from the ankles up, she looked as glossy and glamorous as ever; but from the ankles down—running shoes. They were pastel blue with white stripes.

“Is that…?” My mother looked out the windshield with narrowed eyes.

I nodded, watching Haylie make her way to the front doors of the dorm. Several other people had gotten off the bus with her, but she was already ahead of all of them. She moved quickly, with confident strides. She was almost up at the front doors when suddenly, as if she could feel my mother and me looking at her, she stopped and turned around. She put the flat of her hand above her eyes. And she started walking toward us.

I shook my head. I sat up straight. “She’d better not come over here,” I said. “This better not be about the car.”

“Now, honey,” my mother said. “You don’t know what she wants.” But she pressed the button that locked all the doors.

When Haylie was maybe twenty feet away, she veered toward the driver’s side of the van. I unlocked my door and got out. It was not my fault that my mother was having a hard time, at least not directly. But I wasn’t about to let Haylie bother her now.

“What do you want?” I asked.

She looked at me, lowered her eyes, and tried to step around me. I moved again.

“What? You want to whine to us about your car some more? It’s so sad that you have to ride the bus? Fine.” I pointed at myself. “Whine to me, Haylie. Leave her alone.”

She gave me a look as if I were the one tormenting her and not the other way around. Her nose was pink from the cold.

“I took the bus so I could come here,” she said, her gaze lowered again. “I just want to talk to her. Her, not you. Is that okay?”

I shook my head. The bus didn’t even go out to where they lived. I looked down at her tennis shoes.

“Just talk to me,” I said.

The van’s engine started up. We both turned as my mother’s window shimmied down. She rested her arm on the door, and Bowzer’s face appeared.

“What’s going on?” My mother frowned at the cold air coming into the van and rewrapped the scarf around her neck.

“I’m supposed to give you this.” Haylie reached into her pocket and pulled out an envelope. She tried to give it to my mother. When my mother didn’t take it, Haylie looked up at the sky, which was almost the exact color of her eyes. And it was hard not to look at her, even then, or maybe especially then, and not consider how unfairly beautiful she was. Haylie Butterfield would be beautiful no matter what she did to herself. Black hair. Purple hair. Too much makeup. A bolt though the nose. It wouldn’t matter. She couldn’t get away from it if she tried.

“Jimmy told me you were staying at the dorm,” she said. “What happened this morning. He told me. I called my mom, and she wants you to call her right away. She said you can stay with her. The dog, too.”

Haylie tried again to hand over the envelope, and this time, my mother took it.

“Her phone number is in there. And I wrote out directions to her place.” She pushed a dark strand of hair behind her ears. “She lives in an apartment by the Med Center. It’s really small, and there’s no yard. But she said you could stay there and bring the dog, if it’s really only for a week. She’s in nursing school right now. She’s never home. That’s why my brother’s in Oregon.”

My mother gave the envelope a worried look. She may have been thinking of Haylie’s little brother, but she may have also been realizing that even this new, best option would not be painless. If it’s only for a week. In any other situation, in our old life, this would have been such a hesitant invitation that my mother never would have accepted. She and Haylie’s mother had been friendly, maybe more than acquaintances. But I don’t think they were ever good friends. Now, however, my mother couldn’t worry about imposing. So if this was all that could be granted, even with conditions, fine.

“Thank you, Simone,” my mother said. She put the envelope in her lap.

Haylie looked embarassed. I couldn’t tell if it was the “thank you” or the “Simone” she didn’t want. But I understood right then that I shouldn’t have been surprised that she’d come all this way to find us. Whatever she’d tried to turn herself into over these last two years, some part of her must have remembered what it was like to have everything fall apart. Really, it would have been more surprising if she had laughed at Jimmy’s story and not worried about my mother at all.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She looked at me for just a moment. “I’m sorry about this morning, what he did.”

My mother nodded. “You didn’t do it, hon. You’re not him.”

It was a nice thing to say, maybe the nicest thing possible, given the circumstances. But Haylie looked newly burdened. It was as if my mother, in exchange for the gift of the envelope, had presented her with a problem. She tightened the sash of her red coat.

“I’ve got to go,” she said.

“Do you need a ride somewhere?”

She only considered it for a moment. “Not a good idea,” she said. “I’m on my way home.” She turned and started walking back to the bus stop. Halfway there, she stopped. My mother and I didn’t speak to each other; we didn’t pretend to do anything but watch. Haylie stood still for a minute, maybe two, her hands in the pockets of her coat. She walked to the front steps of the dorm.

She was still there, sitting on the top step, when I got out of the van. She stared straight ahead, her elbows on her knees, her pretty chin resting in her hands. On my way up the steps, I asked her again if she needed a ride. My mother waved from the idling van, but Haylie again shook her head.

She was fine, she said. She was thinking.