Maybe the Moon

things.”
    She laughed. “I’ll bet.”
    “So,” I said, trying to get us back on track, “you think there’s something in a nice crepe de chine?”
    “Oh…right.” She was looking distracted, as if her thoughts had already wandered elsewhere.
    “What’s the matter?”
    “Nothing.”
    “C’mon…spill it.”
    “It seems so stupid now.”
    “Renee, talk to me.”
    She gave me the most pathetic little shrug. “It’s over, that’s all.”
    “What is?”
    “Me and Ham. He says I have to go.”
    When she drenched me with her tears all over again, sobbing so hard that she became incoherent, it dawned on me why she’d been so quick to participate in my mourning—and which one of us was really the orphan.

    I won’t try to build the suspense here, because you already know what happened. Renee moved in a week later, three years ago next June, complete with seventeen pairs of pumps, her Christian exercise tapes, and the aforementioned Mr. Woods doll. (As I write this, the rubbery little wretch leers down at me from his niche in the stereo cabinet.) It was Renee, by the way, who insisted we room together, though I told her from the start I had serious reservations. We hardly knew each other, after all, and I felt that the stars in her eyes might have blinded her to the practical realities of living with someone like me. For better or worse, I am not your standard-issue roommate. I just didn’t think she could handle it.
    I was wrong. Renee slipped into my life as deftly and unceremoniously as Mom had slipped out. To Aunt Edie, she became my reason for staying here: the “old friend” with a car who would love to room with me and was not opposed to paying rent. She even drove me to Baker for the funeral, where, predictably, she wept buckets during the eulogy, much to the bafflement of the other mourners. By the time we got back to Los Angeles we were a functioning unit. Renee had become an old hand at waiting for me to climb down from the car, or asking the waitress at Denny’s for a phone book for me to sit on, or fending off the small children and large dogs I invariably attract in public places. She was natural and un-nursy about this too, as if she performed these courtesies for all her friends.
    Better still, she never stopped being my fan. If anything, her fascination with my career seemed to escalate as we settled into comfy sisterhood. One day I showed her my listing in The Guinness Book of World Records . She was so impressed that she made a Xerox of the page and kept a copy in her purse, so that the girls at The Fabric Barn—or the post office or the checkout counter at Ralph’s, for all I know—could see for themselves that she, Renee Marie Blalock, was now sharing a house with the World’s Shortest Mobile Adult Human.
    I feel a little fraudulent about this, since the Guinness listing I showed her was about four years out of date. In 1985 the World’s Shortest title was copped by a twenty-nine-inch Yugoslavian, who appeared, so help me God, out of thin air. Mom and I went so far as to call the Guinness offices in New York to ask if this foreign pretender had legs, and we were given the most incredible runaround. One of these days, having bragged once too often, Renee will be challenged by some troublemaker with a more recent edition, and I’ll have some serious explaining to do.

    It’s well past dark now, and a nice spring rain has begun to fall, sluicing off the awnings and shellacking the banana leaves just outside our sliding glass door. We have a pink spotlight on that part of the yard, so the general effect, if you squint your eyes just so, is of a rosy-hued aquarium. I half expect to see a school of huge red fish, or a giant crimson octopus, maybe, come shimmering past the door.
    Renee has turned off the TV and is studying an old issue of Us as if she’s expecting a pop quiz. She hasn’t spied on me in a long time, so I figure she’s pleased with my activity, or at least has decided that benign neglect is the best policy. I’m lying stomach-down on my favorite cushion, my “tuffet,” as Renee insists on calling it, even though I explained to her years ago that a tuffet is either a small stool or a tuft of grass. The cushion is covered in a dusty-rose tapestry depicting unicorns and a maiden with a conical hat. It isn’t antique or anything, but I like it because it fits my body, and because Mom gave it to me on my birthday the year before she died.
    I’ll tell you