As soon as she is able, as soon she moves into a house that is big enough, and there is light, and she is sure that they will not move again anytime soon, Devi buys plants. Big rubber plants and a small leaved ficus and two palms that she repots into ceramic pots that she buys at the discount store. These pots are white with blue designs, poor replicas of Chinese pottery with scenes of men fishing and mountains and bamboo trees. She isn’t really one to shower the plants with attention; she remembers to water them, pull off their dead leaves and feed them every few months and that is enough for them to thrive in the bright Texas sunlight that comes in from the windows. Sometimes she notices them, how big they have gotten, and then she polishes the leaves of the rubber plants with mayonnaise so that they will shine.

She keeps all the plants indoors. In the house where she grew up in Delhi, there were many plants in pots outside: snake plants and money plants and philodendrons and small palms. The pots were terracotta, of different shapes and sizes, and in memory they are beautiful in their abundance, their variety. Their care was the work of the bai who came to sweep the floors twice a day. Devi doesn’t remember anyone ever enjoying the plants, remarking on them or fussing over them; that was something that she learned from Mai.

When she first met Mai, when she was newly arrived and just married and she and Mai were graduate students together in Chicago, she went to visit Mai’s small apartment and saw the table in front of the window where Mai kept a collection of houseplants. Mai gave her the first houseplant that she ever owned, a cutting of a money plant in a glass jar with small rocks in the bottom; eventually the plant’s roots grew so long that they wrapped around and around the rocks, anchoring themselves in the jar. The plant itself was a miracle, unfolding new leaves soon after it was resettled. Devi saw this as a funny metaphor and thought the plant much hardier than herself.

When Devi left Chicago, to move with her husband to Texas, she didn’t know when she would see Mai again, she didn’t know how she would finish her PhD, she didn’t know that she was already pregnant with her daughter. The movers had taken their furniture away and it was early in the morning when Devi and her husband were ready to set out for Texas in their car. Devi held the money plant in the jar on her lap and cried quietly for the first hour of the drive. She did not want to leave, she thought, she was just beginning to put out roots.

Twenty-five years later, it is the night before Devi’s daughter’s wedding, and the blouse that she is supposed to wear to the ceremony, to make her seven turns around the fire while the priest is chanting and the guests are looking restlessly on, has come apart. The blouse arrived only the day before, from Dallas, having been tailored to Devi’s daughter’s measurements, but it is ill-fitting and in the process of trying to close the hooks when her daughter tries it on, Devi hears the sound of fabric ripping. Devi and her daughter look in horror at the gaping seams. ‘Oh fuck,’ Devi says, before she can stop herself.

Luckily Mai is in town, having flown in from Chicago for the wedding. Mai has always been good at these kinds of things. Devi sends her daughter to watch TV with the visiting cousins and she goes to get Mai from her hotel. Mai wears her flannel pajamas under her coat, and Devi is reminded of how she sometimes slept in Mai’s apartment when they were graduate students, because her husband was on call at the hospital and she was scared to be alone.

When they arrive at the house, she sets Mai up in her bedroom with the sewing machine and goes to make them some tea. She watches the sureness with which Mai works, the care with which she opens up the lining and deconstructs the blouse. Mai loosely bastes the pieces together, and once again the blouse takes shape. Devi’s daughter is summoned from the living room and tries on the garment so that Mai can see how it needs to be adjusted further. Devi watches them, her daughter and her oldest friend, and she feels a rush of love. Sometimes things are broken and they can be fixed, she thinks. She doesn’t know it, but Mai has already received the diagnosis, she knows of the tumors growing in her colon and her liver, but she doesn’t want to ruin the wedding with her news.

Just a few months after her daughter’s wedding, Devi goes to Chicago to visit Mai. She is sent, soon after she arrives, on an errand, to find a particular variety of Asian pear. The skin of the Asian pear is rough and slightly speckled and Devi feels its heft in her hand. She imagines Mai’s teeth sinking into it and she is taken back to a day when they were both graduate students in Chicago and she and Mai sat under a tree in the courtyard near the lab where they worked and ate apples, carefully collecting the seeds in a cardboard juice container until it made a satisfying rattle when they shook it. But Mai will not eat these pears like that, sitting outside on a blanket or otherwise. Someone, maybe her mother who has reappeared in her life to nurse her these last few months, or Devi herself, will peel and chop the pears and cook them down to a soft gruel so that Mai can eat a spoon or two. Mai wants the taste and what someone told her are the health benefits of the pears even though she is too ill, too far gone to actually consume them. But Devi has spent two hours driving around Chicago in her rental car in order to find them. Denial takes so many forms, she thinks. She couldn’t bear to deny Mai this.

In the end, there are no surprises in Mai’s neat apartment. Her clothes, well worn but cared for, are neatly folded in the drawers and hanging in the closet. Everything is painfully familiar. This apartment was sometimes the subject of Devi’s fantasies; when her kids were small and her work was suffering, and everything felt like failure, she dreamed of leaving it all behind and living like Mai: alone.

The plants on the table in front of the window have been whittled down to a single money plant, because Mai didn’t want to watch them all die while she was in and out of the hospital. The money plant unfurls leaves from the end of each length of vine, oblivious to what is happening around it: it is just a plant now, not a metaphor.

Devi picks up a blanket from the couch, holds it, runs her hand over it, pressing down as if to imprint its texture on the deepest part of her palm. The blanket is made up of many individual squares crocheted from rough polyester yarn in bright rainbow colors. Mai made it herself, early in her graduate student days. Devi holds the blanket and thinks about love, and the kind of love she has found here, how it is different from what she dreamed of as a kid – she dreamed of getting married, of course, but she had no idea what it would really feel like to love and be loved. She remembers how she and Mai sat on the couch sometimes, under Mai’s blanket, facing each other, reading books or magazines, their backs supported by opposite arms of the sofa, her feet resting on Mai’s, or Mai’s on hers.

Having left Mai’s mother at the hospital with the head of Mai’s department to handle the paperwork, Devi has come here for one last chance to be alone, in the quiet before visitors start to come. The vision of Mai in the hospital bed, turned on her side, her arm outstretched with her hand clasped in Devi’s, is still fresh in Devi’s mind. It is hard to understand, even though she has seen it, what exactly the end means. The final breath. Devi moves around Mai’s kitchen slowly, finding a pot and tea leaves and soon the air is filled with the scent of cardamom. She pours out two cups of tea and places them across from each other at the small table as she has many times over the years, sometimes in her house and sometimes in Mai’s. She sits down in front of one and, still dazed, she drinks.