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medication.
    “Whatcha up to, Pearl? I didn’t hear you come in.”
    “Ursula said you were busy with the Quilters Crawl stuff,” she said, returning her attention to the task at hand. I walked over to see what she was doing.
    She was beading by the light of a small daylight lamp that was plugged into the strip on the table. Her feet dangled in the office chair. She opened a prescription bottle with her teeth and spilled out the needles inside. I used a similar container to store broken sharps or bent pins. The little bottles with the tight lids were just the right size to dispose of pointy objects.
    She sorted through the contents of a zipper bag. She grunted, not finding what she was looking for. Frustrated, she dumped the bag.
    Hundreds of seed beads bounced off the table and hit the floor. I gasped. She didn’t seem to notice, picking up the bead she wanted and poking at the needle with clear beading thread.
    I got down on my hands and knees and began picking up the tiny glass balls. I emptied the pile in my hand into her bag and went back on the floor. “Have you seen Vangie?” I asked.
    “She stayed with me last night,” Pearl said. “We watched movies all night. She knows how to get that ’flix thing going. We watched all of the Toy Story movies. I cried.”
    Vangie had told me about their Toy Story marathon. It had taken place over a week ago. Pearl was clearly confused about time.
    “I loved Toy Story 3 ,” I said. “Especially—” I stopped when I realized the losses in Toy Story might hit too close to home for Pearl, whose own loss was not fictional, nor did it involve inanimate objects.
    “Vangie been staying with you a lot?” I asked. Maybe I’d been looking for Vangie in all the wrong places.
    Pearl still hadn’t managed to thread the needle. I wanted to take it from her and do it but she would hate that.
    “We can’t sleep,” Pearl said. “She comes over when we’re both awake. Which is like every night.”
    I doubted Vangie was there nightly but she might be sleeping there once in awhile. Vangie had had to move back home in order to afford school, so maybe she was staying more often at Pearl’s. Her parents’ house was full of younger siblings and grandparents.
    Pearl pulled out a quilt. I glanced at the large clock. We had to be out of here in ten minutes.
    “Pearl, I’ve got to close up in a few minutes.”
    She held up the quilt. The design was pictures of her late husband that had been transferred to fabric. Pearl had colored four of them into an Andy Warhol-type arrangement. Hiro’s big smile and crinkly eyes were surprisingly lifelike.
    Pearl stroked the quilt. “Do you like it? I’m going to bead it. Diamonds in his dimples.”
    “Great, Pearl, it’s great.”
    She stood and stepped over me as I crawled under the table to get the last of the beads. “But first, I have to make sure these trans fers are stuck really good. I hope you don’t mind me turning on your iron. I needed really high heat. You’ve got the best iron around.”
    “Really, we’ve got to get a move on.”
    “It won’t take long,” she said.
    I poured more beads back into her zipper bag. Giving in to Pearl was easier than arguing with her. I could only hurry her along. “Okay,” I said. “But I will turn it off in five minutes, so hurry.”
    She pounded the iron down in emphasis. Her little triceps bulged from moving the heavy iron up and down. Her face was twisted in concentration.
    When she set the iron back down on the board, the soleplate facing me, I gasped. The iron was black.
    “Pearl, have you been using fusible web?” My throat was dry.
    She looked at me and back to her piece laying on the ironing board. She nodded.
    She’d been pressing on the wrong side of the fusing, transferring the sticky gluey stuff to the surface of the iron instead of her quilt.
    I grabbed her quilt. Just as I feared, she’d used the iron on the front of the piece. Two of Hiro’s faces were covered in the