“Your parents are coming? From Arizona?” If they were coming, Katie might be really sick. Bebe had such travel anxiety that they drove a maximum two hours a day, and only if Bebe sat in the back seat chain-smoking unfiltered Pall Malls. Bradley feared that any trip, even to a nearby Costco, might kill them both, given the smoke-filled hotbox of a car they drove around in. So they had moved to a community that had everything within walking distance and almost never left it.

The one time they flew to visit Katie, Bebe lit up in the bathroom, got in a fight with the flight attendant, and the YouTube video almost went viral. Bradley had coaxed her back to her seat with red licorice and a cocktail of lorazepam and beta blockers. When they reached their destination, Bebe’s blood sugar was sky high, and the woman was so uncharacteristically chill, Katie saw her and started to cry.

“So this isn’t a simple checkup?” I said.

“At ease, Sammie,” Holly said.

Ugh, the name I hated, but only when she said it. When others called me Sammie, to be sweet or give me a nickname, it was fine. Holly knew my dad had called me Sammie to be condescending, not endearing. The authority in Holly’s tone and the flush of frustration that filled my throat choked the witty retort I was sure to later say into the rearview mirror in my car.

“I’m trying to catch up. I only just got here, and already Katie’s parents are on the way.”

“There’s no catching up. We don’t know anything yet,” Holly said with the royal we that Katie knew would annoy me.

“My parents are coming for a reason. I need you two to do something for me.” Katie said, “Misty called last night.”

“Misty? Tom’s new wife, Misty?” As I said this, I could almost hear Holly biting her tongue. How many Mistys do we know, Sammie?

Instead, Holly said, “What could she possibly want that she didn’t already get? Or did Tom get his johnson caught in someone again?”

“Is it bad to say I hoped for that?” said Katie sheepishly. “Or better yet, that Misty left Tom for her personal trainer or masseuse.”

“Hope is a thing with lady parts,” said Holly. “Rosie and I will get Tshirts made for the next Gay Pride parade. Or is lady parts too obtuse?”

“I think lady parts is self-explanatory,” Katie said reasonably.

I glanced between Katie and Holly. Wondered if it was safe to laugh, if this joking was meant for me too.

Katie giggled. She knew Holly’s partner, Rosie. Holly had moved back to town a year ago, but I had yet to meet her wife. Ten years after college, Katie had called me and said, “Holly has a girlfriend. She’s gay.” I had felt a sharp pang, the dimples and creases of the dried-up peach pit that I imagined lived in my stomach filled with the acidic loss of Holly. I had so many questions, and Katie and I tried to answer them together over many phone calls, coffee dates, wine bar outings. When did Holly know? In college? Had she wanted to tell me but didn’t? Was that why she got so mad at the Mike thing?

“Do you care if she’s gay?” Katie had asked.

“Only inasmuch as she didn’t tell me. I mean, I know we’re not friends anymore, but still.”

But still what, Sammie? I questioned myself. She didn’t like you as much as you thought? Once she didn’t live with you, you were no longer important? Your perception of your own value, admittedly low, is even lower than you know?

I knew that Katie, Rosie, and Holly met for dinner occasionally or for beers on the Memorial Union overlooking the lake. I’d figured out that the few times Katie didn’t immediately reply to my texts were when she was with Holly. Then it was as if Holly’s twenty-some years of living in Manhattan hadn’t happened, and everybody was friends but me. I was the awkward girl who had a mean dad, an opaque mom, and a liar husband. I was the woman with one friend and her daughter leaving the nest. And somehow this was all my doing.

When Katie said, “Hope is a thing with a muff,” I tuned back in to the conversation.

Holly said, “I’m partial to muff.”

“Obviously,” I said, because, well, obviously. I wanted to join in the fun, remind Holly that we once thought the same things were funny, but it slipped out sounding sour, and so to sweeten things I said, “Hope is a thing with ovaries.”

And with the word ovaries, we were all reminded why we were having a crappy and uncomfortable reunion in a hospital room.

“That would be a great slogan for a fundraiser,” Katie said in her kind voice.

Fun, fun, fun, done. This was what we always said when something we were doing went from funny to unfunny in a flash. It was like being roommates in college again before that night we started as besties and ended as stunned and separated graduates. Unable to move back and unsure how to move forward without each other. A night that started with a party, boys, and drinking and ended with something none of us knew how to talk about.

“Focus, you guys,” Katie said. “Tom dropped Peanut off at a dog pound, I mean a shelter, where they live in LA. Misty thinks it’s one of those places that kills unadoptable dogs. Nobody wants a diabetic Great Pyrenees, especially one Peanut’s extralarge size.” She glanced at the wall clock. “It’s nine a.m. here, and I’m going to start calling every single shelter until I find him. If they let me, I’ll put down whatever money they need to keep him there. Then I’m going to go get him. I hate Tom.”

It was clear to anyone looking at Katie that she didn’t hate Tom. She inexplicably loved Tom, and Tom, for some reason, blamed Katie for his affair, her inability to conceive, her preoccupation with infertility, and her selfish cancer needs. All this and more justified, in Tom’s mind, his search for happiness elsewhere. Whenever I thought of this, my anger rattled through me like a tornado, tossing my emotions like a chair through a window.

Holly closed her hand over Katie’s. “You can’t go get that dog.”

She didn’t understand people and their pets. In 2013, Katie and I had driven to Colorado Springs after the flooding and rescued the white puff of puppy that was Peanut. When we arrived on scene and saw the pup filthy with floodwaters and with too much skin for his body, we both fell in love. He’d been huddled against a worker’s boot, shivering, until he saw Katie. One look at her with his old-man eyes and it was over for both of them.

Peanut’s and Katie’s devotion to each other only increased as the dog grew, and Tom was the kind of man who exploited that kind of love. He hadn’t been part of the rescue effort, even though he and Katie had been married six years by then. Two years later, during their divorce, Tom had the time and money, and fought Katie for Peanut until she ran out of both. When Tom and Misty moved cross-country last year with Peanut, I thought Katie would never get out of bed from the grief.

“Yes, I can go get him,” Katie said, her jaw set, her pale face determined. “I’m well enough right now to travel. I did not save him after all that flooding and shoot him with insulin every damn day, and train him to pee in Tom’s shoes, to let him go.” She took in a shuddering breath and said, “I should have gone right away. I can’t believe I didn’t. I’ve just been so tired.”

For the first time, I noticed that Katie clutched a Kleenex with traces of what looked like mascara in her hand. The thought of Katie putting on makeup before coming to the hospital, dressing up for a possible date with cancer, made my heart turn into a tight fist.

I said, “Holly’s right; you can’t go anywhere right now. But . . .”

“Can you even imagine what is going through Peanut’s big head?” said Katie.

“Someone will adopt him,” said Holly.

Katie gasped. Suggesting that someone other than Katie would end up with Peanut was blasphemy. I wasn’t proud to admit it, but I was almost relieved that the perfect Holly had made such a stupendous mistake.

In one quick movement, Katie swung her legs over the side of the bed, stretching the IV tubing in the process. “Tell my parents I had to go. Tell them whatever. I’m going.”

I placed my hands on her shoulders before the IV ripped out of her vein. “No, I’ll go. I’ll go get him. I’ll find him and fly him home.”

I suddenly wanted to sip the words back into my mouth like loose spaghetti noodles. Who was I kidding? I was a fluff-pillows and nod-at-nurses kind of person, not a swoop-cross-country, get-into-a-fight-with-a-friend’s-ex-husband-and-emancipate-a-Great-Pyrenees person. The breed alone evoked the moving of a mountain. I had a sleep disorder, and if this interaction with Holly proved anything, I was a coward. What would I say to Tom if I ran into him in LA? I pictured it, me trying to get the leash from Tom as he held me at arm’s length, his big meaty hand on my forehead, my arms swiping in the wind.

“He can’t be flown. He’s way too big for the seats, and he would die under the plane in a crate without someone monitoring his blood sugar and keeping him calm. I have to drive him. We bought that old VW camper bus for this reason. Peanut can’t even look at a compact car, let alone fly, without getting hypoglycemic. Remember that one time I test-drove a MINI Cooper and Peanut passed out when I pulled into the driveway? He took one look at the car through the window, flopped onto the carpet, and didn’t move until I drove it back to the dealership.”

“Tom spent thousands to get that dog. Why get rid of him now?” asked Holly.