I held her hand for a moment, savoring the sensation. Then I let it go.

“What’s the matter?”

“I want to know why we can talk about it now,” I said. “We couldn’t talk about it then. I wanted to talk to you. I tried.” She was watching me with concern. I looked away. “I don’t think I can do this. I can’t sit here and eat dinner with you and pretend like this is the happy reunion of old friends. I feel seventeen years old. I don’t feel like I’m another minute older than I was back then.”

“Funny,” she said. “I feel ancient.”

“I’ll get it!” I yelled, nearly yanking the phone out of the kitchen wall. “Hello?”

“Poppy?” Susan spoke in the same quiet, confident voice she always had. I felt a vague sense of resentment. I was a nervous wreck, and she sounded like she was placing an order at the McDonald’s drive-through. “Why did you leave this morning?”

I felt my mother watching me. “I had to let the dog out. He was tearing up your laundry room. Hunter set fire to the drapes last night.”

“We need to talk,” she said, ignoring the non sequitur. “Can you come over?”

“I don’t know.”

“I want to see you.”

I wanted to see her, too, more than anything. I wanted to tell her about Lucky Eddie, that he was coming to my graduation, and that he might give me a car. I wanted to ask her how I could get out of going to N. C. State and sharing an apartment with my mother. I wanted to know if she loved me as much I loved her. I wanted to know if she was a lesbian for life or just for last night.

Instead, I closed my eyes and repeated, “I don’t know.”

There was a long pause, and then, “Is this going to ruin everything?”

“No, it’s just . . .”

“Yes or no, will you see me?”

I couldn’t tell if my mother was listening or not. She seemed to be absorbed in her newspaper, circling apartment prospects with a blue magic marker. “Yes.”

“Good. How about tonight? My parents won’t be home until tomorrow. I called them at the beach house and told them they should stay another day because I was held up at school. Six o’clock. I’ll cook dinner, what do you say?”

I said yes. It was what I wanted to say. I wished I could tell my family to stay away and actually have them do it. Instead, my mother was planning to become my college roommate, and my father was coming to wreck my graduation.

I hung up the phone. “I’m having supper with Susan tonight. In the meantime, I’m going to bed.”

“You can’t,” she said. “You have to be at the flea market in half an hour. Cookie’s expecting you to open the concession stand. Go change your clothes and I’ll drop you off on my way to K-Mart.”

“Why are you going to K-Mart?”

She pointed at the charred fabric soaking in a dishpan on the kitchen counter.

“To buy some new drapes. And a fire extinguisher.”

The light in The Irregardless was dim and intimate. A lone cellist played somewhere out of sight around the corner from our table. I didn’t recognize the piece.

“What kind of surgery did you have?” Susan asked.

“A hysterectomy.”

“Complete?”

“Simple, or rather, halfway complete. They took my uterus and one ovary. One is all you need, they tell me. At least I won’t have to take estrogen to keep from growing a mustache.”

“When was this?”

“Let’s see.” I looked at my watch. “Eleven days ago.”

“Good heavens,” she said. “Why are you here? You shouldn’t be up and around yet. You ought to be at home, taking it easy. How do you feel?”

“Tired and sore,” I admitted. “But I was tired and sore at home. It’s not any worse here, and here is where I need to be.”

She opened her mouth to say something, but I spoke first.

“Tell me about Yugoslavia.”

She took a sip of her wine. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything. What was it like? Why did you go?”

“I went because my father’s family was from Belgrade,” she said. “His father, my grandfather, came to the U. S. in 1919 or 1920, just after the First World War. I never met him. He died before I was born. He was some sort of radical—a bomb-throwing anarchist, my dad says. He spent most of the war in an Austrian prison.”

“Your grandfather was Gavrilo Princip?”

She laughed. “Not exactly. He didn’t shoot Archduke Francis Ferdinand.” She tapped her fingers on the side of her wine glass. “Imagine remembering something like that. We have strange pockets of knowledge, don’t we?”

“It’s the by-product of a liberal education. I can’t remember where I put my car keys, but I remember all sorts of pointless things, like who started World War I, or who wrote London Labour and the London Poor. I don’t know what use it is, unless you’re playing Trivial Pursuit.”

“It’s useful for other reasons,” she said. “The people I work with at the hospital only want to talk about their investments and their Hummers. Physicians can be very dull. All of our light conversation is either boring or macabre.”

“That’s what Abby says. They’re apparently really sick in the Trauma ICU—I mean they make sick jokes. The nurses in her unit are pretty jaded.”

“They would be,” she agreed. “That’s one of the reasons I like working ER. It’s very real. The general population has no idea. They suspect that certain people exist, gang members, murderers, drug addicts, self-mutilators, psychotics. They read about them or see them on the nightly news, but they don’t interact with them in the course of everyday life.”

“And you do.”

“And I do.”

Susan had ordered a vegetarian entrée, and for reasons I couldn’t explain, I’d followed suit. It was good, a Portobello mushroom cap stuffed with tomatoes, garlic, and provolone, and at the same time unsatisfying. What I really wanted was a steak.

“So, you went to Yugoslavia because of Gavrilo Princip.”

“I went to Yugoslavia to be of some use to someone. I had a distant connection to the people and skills I felt were being wasted here. I realized that I’ve been very selfish all of my life, Poppy. My father paid for college and medical school. I never had to work a part-time job or worry about a thing. I finished my general residency and then spent two years training to be a surgeon. I did it because I wanted to make a lot of money. I thought I’d do plastic work, tummy tucks and eye lifts. I’d cater to the vain.”

“I thought you wanted to be a general practitioner, doing the Mother Teresa thing among the poor and needy.”

“That was my high school plan,” she said. “When Jean died . . . I got calloused.”