I wondered if I could just wait in the car to avoid any awkwardness, but Rose directed me to a house near the city center and gave me a look when I didn’t unbuckle my seat belt. When Rose knocked on the door, a woman appeared from behind a screened porch door. She was short, with warm brown eyes and a long braid that swung from her shoulder as she reached for the doorknob. “Come in!” she said. “She’s sleeping right now but she’ll be so happy to see you.”

The smell in the house was all wrong. Our apartment in L.A., after days of being sealed up while we traveled, smelled like musty towels and stale perfume, the scent baking into itself. This house smelled strongly like antiseptic, the stomach-clenching scent of bleach-water that I recalled from cleaning cafeteria tables with old sponges in elementary school.

Our host made us tea with honey, served in sunny yellow mugs, which Rose looked at carefully before gripping the sides and taking a sip. It seemed an odd choice for September, but the tea was fortifying in a way. “You’re getting too skinny,” the woman said maternally, pulling out a loaf of banana bread. “Mrs. Foster—you remember her?—comes by every month with baked stuff, hoping to put a little meat on all of us. Here.” She sliced a couple of thick portions and deposited them onto plates. To my surprise, Rose broke off a piece and popped it into her mouth without asking for a fork, wiping her greasy fingers on a paper napkin.

“Thank you,” I said, and took a small bite. It was buttery and dense. I mentally counted the calories.

Now that the woman was sitting down, I could see the exhaustion. The skin under her eyes was discolored, and her mouth, when she wasn’t smiling toward us, worried itself into a well-worn frown.

“I visited my mom,” Rose said, warming up slightly in the presence of the woman.

“And brought a friend,” Viv’s mother said, looking pointedly at me. She set a hand out toward me, across the table. “Oh, where is my mind? You must be Cassidy. Welcome.” She clasped her fingers on mine and the corners of her lips twitched upward, as if they had to relearn how to smile. “I’m Vivian’s mother, Lorna.”

This woman felt genuine. “Nice to meet you,” I said, stunned at the contrast of warmth from Lorna and coldness from Clara.

Lorna turned her beam on Rose. “The worst is over, mija.”

“What was it?” Rose asked meekly.

With a sigh, she said, “What it always is. Complications. You think it’s worse than it is. Or you think it’s better than it really is. You never know, and you take her in. But she’s all right.”

Rose’s face crumpled and she began to cry with relief. “Now, now,” Lorna said, patting her ineffectually on the forearm. “She’s home, nothing to worry about, see?”

I awkwardly wrapped my hands around the contours of my mug. A baby monitor, set on the edge of the laminate counter near the sink, crackled briefly, drawing my attention. “Ma?” a hoarse voice said.

Rose wiped her face with the heels of her hands. “I’ll go.”

The chair squeaked as she escaped to a back room. Lorna shifted her weight as though she wanted to check on her daughter as well but thought better of it. She set her fingers on the table in front of her, exercising restraint, and smiled brightly at me. “So. Cassidy. How are you enjoying the group?”

Her posture, the question, together, felt like the start of an interview. “It’s been fine. Great. A great opportunity,” I said, mind going straight into PR mode.

“Oh, honey, it is, all right.” Lorna was too anxious to sit still, so she got up to boil more water. “I’ve been with the girls since, well, forever. I’m the original Gloss groupie.” She gave a laugh as she untangled the threads in the box of tea bags. “Seamstress, dress designer, chauffeur.”

There was murmuring in the back room, the rise and fall of Rose’s strong voice and a softer one in response. Lorna continued, accepting my silence as absorption. “I know that it’s a trial, dealing with them all the time. I don’t admire your position.” Her back was to me as she attended to the kettle; she did not move. She should be envying me, I thought. I took her daughter’s spot in this group. I bet the cat fights and long hours would be exponentially more tolerable than a sick child. But I didn’t say anything, and she didn’t correct herself.

I felt very awkward, not sure what subject to touch next, hoping that she would guide the conversation toward a lighter path. Instead, she stayed very quiet near the stove, still facing away, doctoring all the little things that one does to tea. She composed herself and sat at the table again. We sipped resolutely. I felt the urge to apologize. But when I did, she looked into her sunny yellow mug and sighed. “No, it’s fine,” she said. “We’ve had a lot of bad days in this house.” Using a paper napkin from a crumpled takeout bag, she swiped at the crumbs dotting the surface of the table before picking up her cup again. “We used to live really close to the McGills. A couple of blocks away. Those two were joined at the hip. They did everything together. Girl Scouts. Piano lessons. They shared their clothes for a while, until Viv had her growth spurt and Rose couldn’t catch up.” She swallowed. “And they did all the singing stuff together. But then Viv got sick and while Rose helped as much as she could, we moved out here to be closer to the hospital.” That was why the house didn’t feel lived-in or even like a home, much like our tour bus didn’t feel like a home. It was a tool, a transient thing that helped us get from point A to point B. For Viv, that was the medical center a short car ride away.

“That must have been hard,” I said, unsure what else to say.

She nodded silently. “We used to drink cocoa out of these mugs,” Lorna said, laughing sadly. “At sleepovers.”

Rose poked her head out from the hallway. “I need some help.” Lorna stood. I made a move to stand as well but Rose stopped me. “Better not,” she said. “You probably want to meet her when she’s cleaned up a bit.”

So I sat again, listening to the shuffle and creaking of floorboards. I rubbed my thumbnail on the outside seam of my jeans. Takeout bags crowded the kitchen counters, plastic clamshells of grocery-store bakery items stacked up with desiccated flakes of pastry at the bottom.

Finally, after I’d memorized the groove of every paint drip that had been hastily applied to the cabinets, I was called to the back of the house. I passed other open doors as I padded down the hallway: a darkened bathroom with a tap still dripping, a smaller bedroom with sheets askew. Viv’s sick room was an attempt at cheerfulness: it had a bay window and natural light, though the curtain was half-drawn. Her hospital bed had no ruffled adornments, but the coverlet, in a rich shade of maroon, was patterned with a soft fringe that gave it a luxurious look and distracted one’s eye from the various medical paraphernalia surrounding her. Photographs and get-well cards covered a big bulletin board directly across the room, so that she could look at it from bed. This is where the long creature lay, legs covered in maroon, her hair close-cropped and eyes bright. Lorna and Rose flanked her on either side of the bed. I approached the tableau.

“Hello,” Viv said, holding out a large hand with long, slender fingers. She did not have her mother’s hands.

“Hi, I’m Cassidy. It’s so nice to finally meet you.” She winced when I grasped her hand. “Oh! I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right. I’m just a fragile person nowadays.” Her voice was raspy. “I really wanted to meet you, but I hope you don’t mind that I’m going to nap a bit.” She lowered the angle of the bed with a remote, taking her to a more horizontal stance. “I’m just so exhausted.”

Her eyelids fluttered closed as Lorna and Rose held a conversation over her head about Viv’s various treatments, her energy levels, her appetite. I watched her as she fell asleep softly, gently, one finger twitching against the side of her face, the gliding rise and fall of her rib cage shifting the cover’s fringe. She wore a ring identical to the one Rose had on her right hand, and I wondered if they had bought each other friendship rings. My eyes traveled over to the bulletin board and there were photos of all the Gloss girls at various ages, wearing silly costumes and smiling. One photo was a duplicate from Rose’s room: I recognized the wide degree of teeth in the smiles and realized it was the pair of them, arms around each other’s shoulders in that unselfconscious way that preteens grab their friends.

When we left the house, Viv sleeping through the afternoon and not waking to say goodbye, Lorna pressed more banana bread into our hands and gave us long hugs and a kiss on one cheek. To Rose she murmured what sounded like an encouragement and let her go. She pressed the side of her face against mine, her cheek hot, and whispered, “I’m glad she found you.”

18.

Saturday

Rose