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What set me apart from my peers was that I was the only person I knew who’d made the trip out west with her grandmother.
    I wasn’t sure how Grandma would feel about my plan, so I’d broached it carefully, and only after doing weeks of research. I had money from the accident, more than enough to support me for the rest of my life, even if I never got a job, if I lived frugally. My parents might not have had the foresight to make out a will, but my father had two college friends who’d gone into the insurance business, and he had obligingly purchased policies from both of them. The settlement, carefully invested by my grandmother, had given me enough to pay all of my medical expenses,and for my college education, with plenty left over to launch me into a life of my own. I felt guilty about having it, knowing how many of my classmates had taken out loans to pay their tuition and were graduating with six figures’ worth of debt, but the one time I’d said so, Grandma’s lips had tightened, and she’d said, “Divide it by every year of your life you won’t have your parents, and you’ll see it’s not that much.” Divide it, I heard, for every year I won’t have my daughter. After that, I didn’t complain.
    One Friday night in June I laid out my plan, complete with charts and spreadsheets, my best estimations of how much it would cost to live in Los Angeles, with food and rent and car payments, and how long it would take for me to find a job. “I’ll give it a year,” I told Grandma as she sat, legs crossed, in a pale-pink dress printed with red-and-orange hibiscus flowers, a gold cuff bracelet on one of her narrow wrists and a comb ornamented with pale-pink crystals in her hair. “If I haven’t gotten a writing job by then, we can come back east and I’ll think about something more practical. Business school or law school.” It had never crossed my mind to go without her, to head west alone and leave her behind.
    Grandma frowned. “Why a year? Why not two? Why not five? Business school.” She shook her head, repeating the words as if they hurt her. “Why would you do that to yourself?”
    I tried to explain. “I’m sure a lot of people think they can write television shows.”
    She shrugged. “Lots of people probably think it. But you actually can.”
    “Maybe.”
    “No ‘maybe.’ Do or do not. There is no try!” During moments of stress, Grandma had a tendency to sound like, or actually quote, Yoda. “I think you’re a very good writer.”
    I shrugged. I’d written for the school paper all through high school, and had won prizes for fiction and poetry in college, butsecretly, I’d wondered whether I’d won because I’d been the only one who’d entered. Most of my classmates had enjoyed more active social lives than I’d had, and had spent significantly less time in the library. What did it matter that I’d been named the top student in the English department if I was the only one who was even trying?
    Grandma was still mid-soliloquy. “You’re the most determined person I’ve ever met.”
    “You don’t get out much,” I countered.
    Grandma ignored me. “If anyone can break in out there, it’s you.”
    “Okay,” I said. “I figure I’ll give it a year.”
    “Give it two.”
    “Eighteen months?”
    “Fine,” she said. “But I’m paying the rent.” She folded her hands in her lap, telling me that was that.
    “We’ll split it. I’ve got money—”
    “I do too,” she pointed out. “And I might not have long to live.”
    “Oh, boy,” I said. “Here we go with this again.” Whenever she was denied something she wanted—brunch at the Four Seasons for Mother’s Day, a freshwater-pearl necklace, an early-morning trip to Provincetown so she could secure street-side seating for the Mardi Gras parade—Grandma would recite her “I might not have long to live” speech, although from all indications she was perfectly healthy and would probably live, as her own mother