Did I smell liquor? Were their eyes glassy? Were their words slurred from an afternoon of self-medicating?

"I'd really appreciate it," Melody said. She turned to Trina.

They knew that I knew. I could tell by their friendly, phony smiles. Where had they been besides shopping? What had they been doing?

"It's nice to meet you, Melody."

Trina slipped her arm through mine. I breathed deeply to detect weed or alcohol, then stared into her eyes. Were her pupils dilated? "Don't be mad," she said. "Melody and I skipped the last hour of group."

I modulated my internal screaming, made my voice sound normal. "Really?"

"They were just talking about the same old stuff they always talk about, so we went to the store. I told you that I needed a top. Look."

She opened the bag and pulled out a pale yellow blouse.

"Nice," I said.

She beamed, then retrieved a smaller bag from inside the larger one and handed it to me.

A lipstick. Just my shade of red.

"Thanks, honey. You know," I said, looking at Trina, "I have to get back to the shop. A couple of clients are bringing in clothes. Where do you live, Melody?"

"In Compton."

"Compton! You come all the way from Compton to Beverly Hills?"

"The program out my way was full."

I looked at my watch. It was three-twenty. The trip to Compton and back to the store would take at least an hour and a half, maybe more if I ran into traffic. My first client was due at four-thirty and the next at six o'clock.

My daughter's smile was bright and expectant, manipulative. Regardless of what it had taken away, mental illness had conveyed to her a kind of protracted childhood, a long pause filled with delusions of grandeur, no responsibility, very few apologies, and endless adventure. And to me it should have bequeathed an elastic sense of gratitude for life's most minuscule concessions: My daughter was standing right in front of me; I didn't have to go looking for her. Instead, I felt anxious. When is she going to get back to normal?

"BE GRATEFUL," MA MISSY TOLD ME ONE MORNING, WHEN my mother's semiconscious body was lying across the living room floor. She was breathing, but we couldn't rouse her. It was important for her to wake up, wash up, get dressed, and accompany me to school, as she had promised that she would. She was supposed to meet my teachers, sit in the back of the room, and smile when she saw my papers with stars hanging up on the bulletin board, smile again when she heard all the good things the teachers had to say about me. But she wasn't moving, only moaning as I shook her. Ma Missy called her name, softly at first and then loudly. I began to cry. Ma Missy stopped calling my mother and put her arms around me.

"Be grateful, baby. One of these days she'll be all right, and you won't even remember the bad times. Plenty things worse than a drunk mama. Be strong, girl."

But I had never learned to be grateful for having less than I really wanted.

"WE'RE GOING TO HAVE TO HURRY," I SAID, PICKING UP MY cell phone.

Once we reached the car, Trina and Melody sat in the back together, their loud conversation a kind of voluble stage for me to pitch my thoughts against. From time to time they would lower their voices and whisper, reminding me of two conspiratorial teenagers, plotting against the adult.

Compton always surprised me. The neighborhood seemed less the subject of the bicoastal gang warfare of rap lyrics than a blue-collar version of the American dream. Away from its hardscrabble commercial strip, with its row of fast-food restaurants-that high-fat staple of urban America-Korean mom-and-pops, overpriced gas stations, and more beauty salons than beauty, the LA version of "da 'hood" looked like a PG-rated movie. I let Melody out in the middle of a block of neat bungalows, in front of a gray house with a postage-stamp lawn bordered by roses and the ubiquitous impatiens that claimed every garden in LA as home.

"I sure do appreciate the ride," Melody said, as Trina exchanged her seat for the one beside me. "Drive safe." She smiled, then waved green dragon-lady fingernails in my direction.

"TRINA," I SAID, WHEN WE WERE HALFWAY DOWN THE street, "you've had perfect attendance at the partial program. You should be very proud of that. Now"-I hesitated, searching for the right words; Trina's therapist had told me that she needed my approval-"you must stick to the program schedule and stay until the end of every session."

"All right," she said, her voice soft and petulant.

I looked at Trina. Such a pretty face.

"We had lunch with Daddy," she said. "Aurelia came too. When he called at the shop the other day, we arranged it."

"Oh."

"He didn't know I was ditching group. I thought we'd get back in time, but we were having fun. It was kind of a delayed birthday celebration."

"Was Melody with you the entire time?"

Our eyes met; our lips twitched: We were still in tune. Trina and I snickered. Clyde was from the Booker T school of black upward mobility. According to him, if people remained on the bottom it was because they wanted to be there. He'd adopted this philosophy after he learned there was money in conservative politics. Now he had a syndicated radio show from which he broadcast his right-wing sentiments during drive time, Monday through Friday. The talk show, his books and speaking engagements, not to mention his very public anti-affirmative-action campaign, had made Clyde popular and rich. Or unpopular and rich, depending on your party affiliation. Clyde had switched parties, switched streams, and was off course, as far as I was concerned. He was a man with a hole in his soul.

Trina giggled. "Dad pulled me aside and he was like, 'So, do you and Melody hang out together? I mean, she's a lot older than you, isn't she?' "

"What did you tell him?"

"I was like, 'Dad, we don't hang out, per se. We just go to Crazy School together.' You should have seen his face, Mom. Anyway, they were both nice to her. They didn't act stuck up or anything, even when she started speaking Ebonics."

"It's a miracle," I said. Trina made a face. "Mom, you shouldn't stay mad just because you and Daddy broke up before he got rich."

Before Daddy got rich. The transformation occurred after two failed businesses and reasonable success with a third. Just a chance encounter made all the difference. He'd run into a fellow alum. Coffee and conversation followed. Then came lots of cocktail parties with people who frightened me. An invitation to work on a political campaign followed. Keep an open mind; there are rewards, the fellow told him when he balked. Don't do it, I advised. But Clyde's mind had already opened. Something else had closed. Soon I was another thing he'd outgrown.

"I'm not mad," I said, and Trina rolled her eyes.

We were waiting at the corner light. Beyond Trina, on a sidewalk strip of lawn, stood a lemon tree, filled with blossoms. I rolled down the window and took a deep breath. I'd once read that lemon was the strongest of all flavors, not curry or chocolate or coffee. Plain old lemon, which grew anywhere there was warm dirt, could overpower all other tastes. The red light faded to green. Just before driving off, I spotted a heart and two sets of initials carved into the tree trunk. Below them was a hole, the size that a bullet might make.

Trina was quiet during the ride to the shop and stayed in my office, flipping through a magazine, until we closed. The phone was ringing as I drove into my garage, and by the time I got inside there was a message on my answering machine: This is Mattie. Please come to the meeting tonight. Gloria and I want to see you. Milton, too.

The dinner with Marie, Brooke, and Nichelle was on my kitchen calendar. Old friends. New friends. Old life. New life. I called Marie, who had already come by the store, bought the shoes, and reconfirmed our dinner date, hoping she wouldn't be at home. But she answered the phone, listening politely as I explained quickly that I wouldn't be able to go to dinner. Something had come up.

"We really wanted to see you," she said.

If my mind had been clearer, maybe I would have addressed the hurt trickling through Marie's statement. As it was, I was mostly concerned with getting off the phone. "Oh, we'll get together, girl."

"No, we won't."

"This is just a very busy time for me."

"We're all busy."

Eyes shut, I visualized Marie, Brooke, and Nichelle, eating in some restaurant, laughing about nothing at all. They'd be talking about casual things, even when they brought up their children. I still couldn't say Trina's name without holding my breath. We had been very close once, bonded women. Soon, Trina would recover, catch up, resume her life. When she got back to normal, all the way back, when the bad days faded like ink in the sun and God handed me my freedom papers, then I'd go to dinner with Marie, Brooke, and Nichelle. Then I'd be casual again.

3.

MILTON, MY FRIEND GLORIA'S HUSBAND, WAS INTRODUCing the speaker, the famous UCLA professor of psychiatry Dr. Henry Gold, as I tiptoed down the aisle of All Souls Presbyterian Church, where the support group was held the last Wednesday of every month. A small dapper man with a calm air, Milton spoke in a monotone as he listed the speaker's outstanding accomplishments in his field. From time to time, he glanced at Gloria, who was seated near the front, and she would smile and nod. Dr. Gold had already begun speaking when I slipped into the fifth pew and settled into my seat. I had left the house late, running back inside several times to get my glasses, a liter of water, keys. My procrastination was deliberate. The meetings had fallen off my list of things to do. Already, my mind had begun drifting.

Usually, the support group met in the basement, but that smaller space couldn't contain the crowd gathered to hear the "internationally renowned" Dr. Gold. He appeared to be in his forties, a big man whose voice vibrated with such a hearty cadence that his pronunciation of the polysyllabic brand and generic names of the latest psychotropic drugs bounced off his tongue like lyrics to a heartfelt rap. The newsletter had billed him as "an orthomolecular psychiatrist, an innovator in the field of brain diseases who has done extensive research on the impact of nutrition on bipolar patients."

"How is mental illness linked to nutrition?" he asked from behind the pulpit.

I opened my schedule book to the blank pages in the back, my pen poised loosely between my fingers. In the darkest days, when the only thing worse than not knowing Trina's whereabouts was being a witness to her manic acts of self-destruction, when seventy-two-hour holds became twofers-therapeutic benefit for Trina and my only possible escape-I would have sat rigidly in my support group chair, straining to hear while thinking, hoping, praying that the knowledge of whatever expert who stood before me might be the salvation I was seeking. Some of the people around me were Clenchers, leaning forward in their chairs, forgetting to take a breath as their muscles locked. Others were cowering on the edge of their seats, as if furtively seeking to ward off the next unexpected pounding of waves they couldn't see from an ocean they couldn't control.

Listening to the ebullient doctor from UCLA rattle off a vitamin regimen for the mood-disordered, I felt myself being pulled back into bleak waters. Strange how the same thing that once kept me afloat now had the power to make me feel as though I were sinking all over again. I stood up, glad that I was at the end of the pew, and walked quickly down the aisle with my head bowed. I knew my face revealed I was desperate to leave, and I didn't want to advertise that to the rest of the group. Making my way to the stairs, I went down to the basement, a large empty room, and took a seat in the back. I'd wait here for the forty-five minutes that the meeting would last and then hang out with Gloria, Milton, and Mattie. I closed my eyes.

The rich, fragrant aroma of percolating coffee and the faint, sweet odor of the cookies and fruit that would be served after the meeting filled the area. The basement was directly below the sanctuary. Dr. Gold's muffled lecture wafted downstairs, but at least I didn't have to watch the hopeful, straining to hear the restorative miracle in each word.

My head was falling forward in a nod when suddenly I bounded straight up. Above me was the unmistakable tone of discord. The words crap and jerks and so-called experts were hurled through the floorboards like spears. A few minutes later, heavy, deliberate footsteps were descending.

"Keri?"

The white woman in front of me wasn't so much standing as she was looming, a wounded lioness pressing against her cage. My name was a snarl in her mouth. There was an unlit cigarette between her two fingers, and she flipped it back and forth furiously. She was tall and a bit overweight, with frizzy hair that was growing out of the blond dye job that someone had administered too many appointments ago. Her hazel eyes were partially hidden by drooping eyelids above and dark circles below. Whatever age she was, she looked older.

"Bethany," I said. "How have you been?"

She nodded, a clipped, jerky gesture that underscored the tension that was tightening the muscles in her face, the cords in her neck. In the world of the Serenity Prayer, tranquillity was definitely not her goal. Bethany was the rabble-rouser of the group. At every meeting she railed against insurance companies and psychiatrists, medications and rules. She waved her cigarette and ignored my question.

"That Dr. Gold is full of shit. This fucking group is full of shit."

She didn't lower her voice. Bethany wasn't looking for a response, just an opening. My head tilted slightly. From that angle, her rage was palpable, bristling on her face like a skunk's raised tail.

Wham! The heel of her hand hit the back of my folding chair. "This is such a sick joke. He's talking about nutritional supplements, the latest this, the latest that, the marvelous advances. How the hell do we get them to take anything? Tell me that. Dammit, we're all here because the people we love won't take their meds. That's why their lives are a mess, and that's why our lives are a mess. If the expert isn't going to address that one salient issue, he might as well stay away from the party."

The chair's last vibration subsided just as Bethany's rant ended. I half expected some angry church administrator to burst into the room and demand that we settle down, which would have been futile. What was inside Bethany couldn't be called to order. I knew from previous meetings that her daughter was a wild marauding schizoaffective-a mixture of psychosis and mood disorder, not necessarily at the same time-zooming full throttle toward the abyss. The emotions registering in Bethany's tired eyes and pressed lips vacillated between outrage and hysteria. I knew how bad it could get, and it was clear that Bethany was living in that deep gully. There wasn't a rope long enough to pull her out. I reached up and squeezed her hand.

"It is what it is," she said grimly. "How's your daughter?"

I didn't want to tell her, didn't want to make her feel worse than she already did. "She's doing okay," I said.

"You're so lucky. Angelica is still . . . way, way, way out there."

Her face was exhausted. She seemed completely drained, as though someone had siphoned from her everything that made her human.

"I'm sorry. She'll come around. She's still young."

She looked as though she needed to be touched. I stood up and hugged her. I'd been a masseuse once, in another life, right after my college years. My grandmother had had arthritis; it comforted her for me to rub her back and shoulder blades, and it soothed me too. So I took a class, and then another, and after a while friends and friends of friends were calling me, setting up appointments, paying me. My first job in LA-after Clyde, Trina, and I moved there from Atlanta-was working as a masseuse in a hot Beverly Hills day spa. Clyde thought it was a pink-collar job, that working with my bare hands demeaned him as he moved up. He reminded me that I had a college degree and nagged me to quit. A public relations firm hired me; later I opened the store. But soothing bodies will always be my gift.

I kneaded the area on Bethany's back between her shoulder blades. The knots I felt had absorbed a lot of tension that would take weeks to rub out. When I was just getting started as a masseuse, I'd touched a woman where her emotional pain was stored and she began crying hysterically right on the table. With Bethany I stopped rubbing after a few minutes; it would have taken very little for her to become unhinged.

"You have to take care of yourself," I said, which was support-group speak, better than English for easy detachment. I tried to step back from Bethany, not wanting to think about her pain, let alone see it. Her sorrow was a skin I had partially molted. But Bethany wouldn't release me. We stood there hanging on to each other, while above us we heard the commotion of people getting out of their chairs. In a moment they would troop down to the basement en masse.

"Angelica's becoming a monster," Bethany whispered against my neck. "She goes into bars and starts physical fights with anybody: men, women. She's attacked me." Her sunken eyes filled with tears. "It's not as though what she has is a death sentence. Why won't she take her meds?" She pulled back from me and stared into my eyes. "Why? She's not so far gone that she can't see what a mess her life is. Do they forget what normal feels like?" She took a breath, flipping her cigarette up and down. "And then they give us this asshole, telling us about vitamins."

She wiped her eyes, squared her shoulders, and dropped my hand.

"Look at this," she said, turning so I could see the back of her head. I tried not to gasp. There was a large bald spot near the top.

"It'll grow back. You need to stop worrying. Listen, the kids are on their own timetable. Angelica's not dead. She's not in jail. Be grateful for that. She's still here, so she has a chance to begin again."

"Like your daughter?"

I nodded. "Six months ago, if anyone had told me that my child would be where she is now, I don't think I would have believed them. My hope was gone at that point. This is a kid who'd beaten me up, was smoking dope on a daily basis, was hanging out with the dregs of the earth."

"Promiscuous?" Her voice dropped when she pronounced the word.

We both looked at each other and breathed deeply. It didn't matter that hypersexuality was a standard part of the illness, this tragic impulse we couldn't take in stride. Bethany saw what was in my eyes: Don't go there.

"What am I supposed to do, leave this up to fate? I'm supposed to say the goddamn Serenity Prayer while my child destroys her life because her fucked-up brain keeps telling her she's okay?"

"It's hard, but what else can you do?"

"Not everybody sits around waiting," she whispered, then glanced around her. "There are other alternatives." Bethany must have seen the question in my eyes, but she didn't answer it. "You haven't been to many meetings lately. I think you feel the same way I do about this crap. You just don't know it yet."

"No," I said quickly. "You're wrong. The group helped me. I couldn't have gotten through this alone."

She gave a short laugh; then her face went grim. "There's all kinds of ways not to be alone," she said. "Better. There is such a place. It's not just a rumor some shrink got started. I will do whatever I have to do to get there," she said.

"You can't make it happen."

"Yes, I can."

Her intensity sent a tremor through me, like when I heard Aretha sing "Respect" for the first time. I watched her as she walked away. She moved like a warrior woman, with long, purposeful steps, as though she were on her way to someplace very specific. Yes, I can. Wherever those words led her, it wouldn't be an easy journey.

People were already filling up the basement. I looked around. The meeting was on the west side of town, land of high real estate, fair-skinned people, and the coldest ice. Part of me resented having to trek all the way from Crenshaw to get help for my child's issues. But the truth was, mental illness had a low priority on my side of the city, along with the color caste and the spread of HIV. Some things we just didn't talk about, even if it was killing us. So I had to come to the white people, who, although just as traumatized, were a lot less stigmatized by whatever went wrong in their communities. All this is to say: It was easy to spot Gloria, Milton, and Mattie in the crowd.

Milton gave me a quick kiss on my cheek. "You're looking good, girl," he said.

"Welcome back, stranger," Gloria said.

"You look great," Mattie said.

I twirled around. "Armani. Retails at twenty-four hundred. On sale for three twenty-five. Take it home tonight."

"What will you wear?" Gloria asked.

"Your money," we all said together.

Mattie and Gloria cracked up.

"Let's go get something to eat," Mattie said.