Summary

Cathy makes her annual trip to see her long-time friend Della at the Wyndham Falls “Gracious Retirement Living” in Connecticut. She brings a new book for Della that she hopes could serve as “a kind of medicine” to lift Della’s spirits (3). Della was visiting therapists and undergoing memory tests, but does not reveal the name of her illness, which she refers to as “my malady,” which makes Cathy fearful of Della’s possible condition and anxiety (10).

The third person narrator intersperses accounts of Della and Cathy’s history, between narrations of Cathy’s several visits to the retirement home. Cathy and Della first met forty years ago, when they both worked at the College of Nursing, and had been friends ever since. Cathy was thirty and Della was in her fifties when they first met. Cathy opened up to Della about her sex...