Rhoda arrives in her van. She parks it in the guest parking, takes an elevator to the seventh floor and walks into Molly's apartment. Rhoda is intensely tense and equally determined not to show that. Julia is already there, falling apart but hiding it. Rhoda gives Molly that subtle smile of hers that usually makes people feel good regardless of Rhoda's own mood. That semi-professional smile which is supposed to put you at ease. It doesn't work though, not on Molly. Molly is a tough cookie. She remains unmoved, although she seems to like having both Rhoda and Julia in the room with her. But when Julia starts gathering clothes, sheets, towels, photographs, and books, Molly loses her composure and becomes agitated.
   "What are you doing here?" she keeps asking. And Julia? Julia keeps repeating her fabricated lie,
   "They are remodeling all apartments in the building. All the tenants must move out temporarily."
They go rounds and rounds with these two lines slightly varying the wording while Rhoda and Julia are packing things for moving.
Rhoda's sister Mia arrives. Immediately Mia and Julia begin lagging suitcases, an armchair, folding bookcases, and plastic garbage bags filled with pillows and blankets out of the apartment, into the elevator, out of the building and into the cars. That takes three trips and they are done.

Now Rhoda propells Molly out of her home where she has lived for seventeen years and all but the last three of these seventeen were filled with doing artwork, reading, taking walks, visiting with neighbors...

Molly rides in Rhoda's car. Mia and Julia each drives her loaded car. Forty minutes later their caravan completes the journey. They quickly unload the stuff and bring everything into Molly's new room.

Rhoda and Mia leave. Julia's friend Amy walkes in and gives Molly a hug. She has offered to meet Julia in the Assisted Living building. Amy is to help in the second phase of the move. Amy takes Molly for a walk. The two of them go to explore the grounds so that Julia could set the room up. An hour later the books are on the bookshelves, the bed is made, numerous pictures hang on the walls and framed photographs were occupying all horizontal surfaces, except for the bed, that is.

Two women knock on the door and introduce themselves. They would meet Molly and take her to the dining room for dinner. Amy and Molly return, and Mother is shown the dining room with several tables for four.
   "How do I pay for this meal," she inquired.
   "Julia has already paid," Amy places her hand on Molly's.
   "Fine, I'll see you, girls, tomorrow," Mother says and thus dismisses them.

****

When Julia arrives the next day Molly has all her things gathered together in four neat bundles. She is sitting on a bare mattress among these packages. Her face lights up.
   "All is ready," she says proudly. "Just waiting for you to pick me up."
Julia gasps, takes a deep breath and cheerfully asks Molly to help unpack her things. Molly agrees and together they put the sheets back on the bed, the pillow back into the pillowcase, and the blanket onto the sheets. Then they hang the clothes back in the closet. The photographs that Molly had packed between her sweaters go back onto the windowsill and the tables. They finish. Molly looked around with satisfaction and says that is was well done.

The very next day Julia comes to visit Molly again, and the exact same thing happens.

BUT

In a nutshell, Molly is safe now. Julia is told that Molly eats three meals a day. She walks in a little garden. So far she has slept well. No wandering in the middle of the night.

***

OPERATION LIQUIDATION

The first Sunday after the move Julia spends in Mom's apartment. She is there with Chana who came back from England just Friday morning and whose reassuring presence feels very good. It is amazing how reliable and supportive a nineteen year old can be. The whole morning they are working together, unearthing things and things and things. Deciding what to throw away, what to give away and what to keep. They come across this and that little thing and talk about Molly, and pack, and laugh at some of their memories, and cry at some others.
   "Look, those must be Avi's diapers," Chana shows Julia a plastic bag with several Pampers in.
   "Let me see. Well, actually, those are yours. Even before they started printing little pictures on the waistline strip."
   "Mom, they are antique."
   "Just about."

Julia is busy collecting and packing Mom's watercolors, acrylic paintings, and pastels. How she liked to paint. Loved it. Became very good at it. She worked every day, portraits, landscapes, some from memory, a lot from imagination. She loved to paint portraits of children. A neighbor would come and give her a recent school picture of a grandchild. A few days later the amazed woman (and Mom's neighbors were mostly women) would walk out of Mom's apartment with a newly created portrait in her arms, gazing at Mom's work through tears of admiration. Mother became a celebrity of a sort, and proudly enjoyed her status. There was a period when she studied Japanese prints, and did quite a few acrylic paintings with the Japanese theme. Julia brought her a book about Mary Cassatt. Molly laughed appreciatevly when she saw Cassatt's prints from the times when the artist adapted Japanese style.

That big easel by the wide window of Molly's living room got a lot of use.

And then she just stopped.
   "I'm not in the mood," she would say when Julia asked her why she was not painting anymore.
   "Let's do it together," Julia would bring a large pad of good drawing paper and ask Molly to draw Julia while Julia would be drawing Molly.
   "No, some other time."
Julia would ask again and again, but Molly wouldn't want even to hold a pencil. Only four or five times did Julia actually convince Molly to try and nothing good came out of it. Molly's drawings were child-like. They upset her. She would drop the pencil and become very quiet. She just sat limply with that troubled look on her face. She would lift her anxious eyes at Julia and give her an excuse. Something like the eyeglasses weren't good, or the mood wasn't right.
   "You have to be in the mood, or this is what you get," she told Julia. It was so sad Julia wanted to cry. It was as if the life went out of her.

Here are her brushes, boxes with paints, and loose tubes, and pencils. When she was painting, her desire to cover surfaces with designs could overflow onto objects that were hardly suitable. She painted landscapes on the white Styrofoam trays that came as a part of meat or fish packaging. She washed them, and once they dried, they became her canvases. She painted flowers on the plastic milk containers and two-liter Sprite bottles. What was Julia to do with those?

And her embroidering. She had developed her own technique and was putting little flowers on everything around her.
   "Mom," Julia would say, "let me bring a nice blouse for you to embroider. Would you embroider my beret? The blue one, and the burgundy?"

She did, but she also put these beautiful flowers on old T-shirts, and on faded sweaters, she was so incredibly generous with her flowers. She stopped embroidering about the same time when she stopped painting.

Three huge pots with withering plants stood by the window. How everything grew for Mom. Her plants expanded in their rapid and healthy growth. This plant that was touching the ceiling, it was so small in its little pot when Chana gave it to Molly many years ago. And the aloe plant, Julia remembered when and where they got it, just a tiny thing. It grew into a large bush... The plants didn't look healthy anymore. Molly still watered them occasionally, but she had lost her interest in them.

Glass jars, hundreds of them, old pots and pans, rusty, broken, torn clothes, in the closets, drawers. All that had to be taken out.

They found the photo camera, which disappeared three years ago.
   "Stolen," Mother told Julia again and again. Lots of misplaced things were proclaimed stolen. That was a rather long period when she thought that she was surrounded by thieves. Things were taken away from her. Evil people would get into her apartment and eat her food, steal her things. She knew how to hide things, under the couch, behind the chest of drawers, between the mattress and the spring box. She wrote a big sign and placed it by her front door. "Thieves, you are wasting your time," read the sign. "There is nothing to steal here!" Still things were disappearing. She would go to the bank and take out a hundred dollars, and they would be gone. Sometimes Julia would find Molly's money in one of those improvised caches, other times she'd figure out that Molly had spent it. Julia took over Molly's banking activities. Julia took over Molly's shopping, Molly wasn't getting any good food anymore. She would walk to the store and once there she simply wouldn't remember anymore what were the things that she needed, so she would walk back home.

They had been going through phases. But all along Mother wanted to live in her apartment among her things, and be independent.
   "Thank you for all your trouble," she would say, "but, frankly, you shouldn't bother. I'm perfectly capable of taking care of myself."

For quite a while Julia had been having a recurring nightmare. She dreamt how she was undoing her mother's apartment, and Mom, she was no longer living. And Julia was all alone there in that apartment where everything was covered with a thick layer of dust, and she couldn't breath. She thought it was because of the dust, but it wasn't dust, it was a huge lump in her throat that wouldn't let any air into into lungs. Then Julia would wake up and find her face all wet with tears. Some nights Julia was afraid to fall asleep because of the fear of choking in her dream . . .

And so Julia felt lucky that Sunday dutifully performing that sad task of finishing up, wrecking, demolishing, and eliminating her mom's home. She was lucky because once they finished, she would go and visit Mother at her new place, and Molly would smile at Julia, and they would hold hands, and Molly would order Julia around.

Sam arrived at three. Bella came shortly after and parked the U-haul by the entrance. She brought David and Josh. Together they emptied Mom's home.

****

Days were going by and Molly was getting used to the idea that she could go on a trip if she wanted to, or go to a conference, or whatever. She tried to look for new contracts more aggressively. She had lost so many opportunities in last three years. She couldn't take any job if it required even a little travel. She had to stay put so that Mom could have her within reach. She also refused the jobs that had to be performed on site. Nobody would tolerate a worker who was receiving a stream of personal calls during office hours and who jumped into her car and drove away after some of those calls. Julia only did work that could be done from her home office and then uploaded to client's computers. She managed, but barely so. It wasn't anything exciting. When asked what she did for living, Julia usually replied, "I code for food." Now she really, really needed to get back into her normal work routine, especially because a year in Mom's new place cost her about the same as an undergraduate year at Harvard,that would be tuition, room, and board combined.

****

Actually Julia was taking a great pleasure in coming to see Mom, and taking walks with her, and holding her hand, and answering her questions, over and over again, the same questions. And Molly would sing sometimes - in Yiddish, and she looked happy. They both seemed to be very appreciative of that time together, that was hardly possible in the past, since Julia was always busy roaming Molly's apartment in search of hidden trash, dirty laundry, and rotting food. Julia talked to Molly on the phone right before this Shabbos and Molly said that everything was fine, although she was not amused, "imagine that: the girl in the kitchen has her long hair loose."