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better.”
    “We have a film society here. And what film is your favorite?”
    “Jilted, starring Cee Cee Bloom,” Nina said, and Cee Cee wanted to kiss her cute face.
    “Private bathrooms,” Cee Cee said after the tour. She was sitting on the chair across from the bed in Nina’s new dormitory room. She could see the sprawling campus all green and lush through the open window, and the parking lot in the distance, where the Chevy and its contents waited for her.
    “Cee Cee, they just showed us a huge science hall, a polo field, a language lab, and a big amphitheater, and all you keep talking about is the fact that the dorm rooms have private bathrooms.”
    “Hey, I’m impressed. You’re looking at someone who didn’t have a bathroom to herself till she was twenty-nine.”
    Nina was slowly and painstakingly making the single bed, lifting each corner of the light mattress in order to tuck in the hospital corners. Bertie had taught her to do that and everything else perfectly. Cee Cee tried to imagine the proper and orderly life Nina
     
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    would live here just to console herself, but still she felt like a rotten shit.
    Earlier in the week Cee Cee had called Hal Lieberman in Los Angeles. He was house-sitting at her place in Brentwood and she told him the news about Bertie’s death, knowing he was someone she could trust with her raw feelings. A mensch, her mother would have called him.
    “Cee, I’m sorry,” he said. “Is there anything I can do to make your return here easier?” Hal’s own home was a studio apartment containing a bed, a chest of drawers, and the baby grand his grandfather gave him for his bar mitzvah, so he had readily accepted the assignment to stay at Cee Cee’s big, roomy rented house.
    “Keep the porchlight burning,” she told him. “I’m dropping Nina at school and coming home to try and glue my life back together. Am I still in the business?”
    “Are you kidding? You are the business,” he joked, then added gently: “Don’t be too tough on yourself. Everything will shake out and be okay.” Shake out and be okay. No chance. She was copping out on her promise to an orphan, how could anything make that okay?
    “Neen, this place is lovely,” she said, sounding like Jayne Meadows describing a float in the Rose Bowl Parade. “The classrooms are fancy, the other kids look great, you’ll wear the lovely plaid uniform so you don’t have to think about clothes every day. And that lovely woman who gave us the tour, seemed so…”
    “Cee,” Nina said stonefaced, “I’m sorry to interrupt you, but anytime you use the word lovely three times in one breath … I know you’re freaked out. But it’s okay. I’ll settle in here. I’ll be with lots of kids, and you can call and tell me all your adventures, and I’ll mark off the days on the calendar until our trip to Las Vegas. You’d better pull yourself together or you’re going to hurt your career even more.”
    That little face. Those big-girl words coming out of that little sweet face, that look in her eyes which, now that Nina had removed the sunglasses, Cee Cee could see looked too old for someone so young.
    “You’re amazing,” Cee Cee said. “So amazing you make me feel like a complete jackass. And it must be in your blood, because your mother had a way of doing that to me too. On a regular basis.” She walked to Nina and hugged her and gave her a little kiss on the top of the head, and as she did she inhaled the sweet clean smell of the
     
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    little girl’s hair. Then she held her at arm’s length and said, “I promise I’ll call you every day,” then, trying not to make a big deal out of it, she turned and walked out of the room. When she was about halfway down the hall, she thought she heard Nina say, in a voice that sounded like it was pushing to come off as cavalier, “Once a week will probably do it.” But she kept walking and when she got outside the