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great.”
    “Thank you,” I said. “Now tell me everything.”
    Turned out the seventeen-year-old new mother had been lying about keeping up with her appointments for prenatal care and hadn’t seen the doctor since her second visit. The doctor said they had tried to contact her, but all the information she’d given them was bogus, which was really unfortunate since he had some bad news. Before she had stopped coming, she had tested positive for HIV. When the doctor told her after the delivery, she freaked out and started screaming that they were lying and she didn’t have to stay and hear no more shit from them about what she had or didn’t have and to just hand her back what she came with and she’d get the hell out of there.
    The doctor finally gave her a sedative and Joyce sat with her until she calmed down and went to sleep. The baby’s tests wouldn’t be back until morning.
    “What did he think her reaction would be?” Joyce said. “He just told her outright. No preparation or anything. She’s lying there with a brand-new baby and he just tells her like that? He didn’t even give a damn. He might as well have been talking to a chimpanzee.”
    Joyce looked like hell. Her hair needed rebraiding. Her sweats were working overtime to accommodate her new hips and thighs, and her sandals were tired Woodstock wanna-bes.
    “How’s your diet coming?” I said.
    She tried to get her feelings hurt, but I wasn’t going for it. “I’m working on it,” she said.
    I just looked at her.
    “I’ve lost fifteen pounds,” she said.
    I raised my eyebrows.
    “Okay,
ten.”
    I knew the best she could claim was holding steady, and she knew it, too.
    “So sue me,” she said. “I had a couple of months when all that stood between me and taking a tumble was a bowl of Jamoca Almond Fudge and some homemade Toll House cookies.”
    I should have known.
The dread tumble.
When my mother committed suicide, some religious group sent us a bunch of pamphlets they had put together for the bereaved loved ones struggling to understand. We were pretty desperate for some kind of straightforward way to talk about what had happened, but when we read these little booklets, they were mostly full of ways
not
to talk about it, or if you did, to be sure you put the weight on the dearly departed and not on yourself.
    Coping with guilt seemed to be a major deal for these particular pamphleteers, and one of them suggested that even using the word
suicide
gave it too much guilt-producing power. The left-behind loved ones were encouraged to try out new words or phrases to describe the indescribable. The author offered several suggestions, including the fairly generic “slipped away,” the slightly more judgmental “took a wrong turn,” and, our all-time favorite, “tumbled into the abyss.” After that, whenever we talked about suicide, we talked about “taking a tumble.”
    “I just couldn’t believe he wasn’t coming back,” Joyce said. “At first I kept thinking if I could make it through that first year, I’d be okay. But I wasn’t okay.”
    “It takes time,” I said.
    “I know.” She took my hand. “This is terrible, but sometimes I used to sit here and make lists in my head of all the people who deserved to die more than Mitch.”
    “I know that game.”
    “Not one of my favorites.” She shook her head as if to make sure there was no part of her brain still secretly taking names.
    “Better now?” I said, remembering one night after the funeral when I got up and found Joyce sitting in the dark by herself holding Mitch’s glasses and crying.
    “Much better,” she said. “Once I stopped feeling guilty about living off the life insurance money and quit working for the state, I got so busy with the Sewing Circus, I didn’t have time to be sitting around here driving myself crazy.”
    “Guilty?” I said. “Why?”
    “When the check first came, it felt like blood money to me. How much could they pay me to make up for