Louise calls Janet and announces that she is moving back to Kansas, to the college town where Tom lives. Janet is stunned. It’s October, only six months since the craniotomies. Janet knows she still walks with a limp. Warner says Louise cannot stand up from a chair without tipping over, or sip water while walking. “I don’t know about you living alone,” Janet says. “Too late—I’ve already signed the lease,” Louise says. “Well, you always were headstrong,” Janet says, and realizes what a great thing it is, to be able to say that Louise is still Louise.
When Janet sees Louise on moving day morning, Louise is wearing the big, grey orthopedic shoes Janet ordered her. She is trying to be fashionable in dark jeans and a pretty blouse, big earrings, but her glasses are still taped. The left side of her face is still paralyzed. Janet strokes her daughter’s hair, which is now shoulder-length and layered, and notices the scar from the incision, pink and shiny. Just be upbeat, Janet tells herself.
The whole family, Warner and Elizabeth included, spend the day moving Louise into her new apartment. “New” isn’t the word, Janet thinks, as she looks around the wobbly complex with wood panels down the front, like a bib. The place is crammed with college kids probably not old enough to drink. Janet cannot picture Louise making friends with any of them. Every balcony is cluttered with miniature grills, stereo speakers, and empty beer bottles. Louise says she picked it because it is right next to the university where she will start classes soon, the same school she went to as an undergrad, but Janet wishes she would have tried a little harder to find a better place—maybe she could rent a room in a kindly professor’s house? It’s like she’s trying to insert herself in her old, party-girl life again.
Louise roams the place happily, dragging herself along the walls. “Look, all the rooms are painted different colors! The bedroom is bright pink and the kitchen is electric blue! There’s a closet, and over here a little shelf!”
Warner, Elizabeth, and Janet look at each other. Janet whispers, “What a dump.”
Warner has brought books for Louise that he stacks on a sticky shelf: a self-budgeting workbook and pamphlets on home repair and personal safety. Elizabeth has pulled some items from their basement: towels, framed pictures, rugs. Tom carries the heaviest ends of mattresses and boxes. There isn’t much to carry: a friend’s couch, a lamp, some plastic dishes with roses on them. Janet puts on rubber gloves and cleans under the kitchen sink. Of course she finds mice turds and cockroaches.
No one wants to leave. They stand around in the little main room and talk, their voices echoing off the walls.
As Janet gives her a good-bye hug, she asks Louise if she has any food.
“We just ate,” Louise says.
“I mean in the cupboards,” Janet says. She takes Louise to the grocery store and they buy organic everything, cartons of eggs and bags of bright fruit. Once they are back and it all is put away, Janet has no choice but to go. Her new boyfriend tries to comfort her on the way back to their small town, but Janet just rests her forehead on the window. She keeps thinking of Louise sleeping in that place, and having to get up in it in the morning, alone.
Warner spends most of the moving day putting up blinds, touching up grout in the bathroom, checking the smoke alarm. He walks around the place with a large ruler, making sure all the pictures hang right. He still doesn’t understand what Louise will do, really, or how she will do it. He feels as if Louise is a teenager leaving home for the first time, only worse. Warner does not really remember the first time Louise left home for college. She suddenly was just gone, and he’d never had to worry about her at all, not about drinking or smoking or grades or boys. Why is that? Why hadn’t he worried?
As they drive away, he and Elizabeth glance through the rearview to see Louise bent over a box. Warner feels he is doing the wrong thing but keeps on driving away. He does not know what else to do.