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I’VE NEVER BEEN ONE of those women who carries a small cosmetics department in my purse. But I know I have enough to get the job done between when I arrive in Mineola and before Katherine Welsh calls her first witness of the morning, a high school friend of Morgan Carson’s.

Norma Banks has just pulled up in her Uber when I’m getting out of my own car.

“What happened?” she says, the bright blue eyes locked on me. “Something bad happened, didn’t it?”

“No, something good,” I say, adding that I’ll tell her when I’m inside, right before the two of us blow past the media rope lines, me only offering a wave of the hand as I tell them all to have a blessed day.

From behind me I hear one of the male reporters call out, “ Blessed day? Who are you?”

When it’s just Norma and me in the ladies’ room, I tell her about the tumor shrinking and why that matters, how the best I’ve done before this, since the day Sam Wylie sat in the same office and gave me the news about my cancer, was the tumor not getting any bigger.

“Fuckin’ ay,” Norma says.

“You know there’s no victory laps in this game, right?” I ask.

I’m leaning over the sink getting myself as close to the mirror as possible, doing the best I can with what I’ve got to work with, like I’m in training to be a makeup artist.

Behind me I see Norma smiling.

“So the shit they gave you in Switzerland that’s been making you feel this shitty since you got back is actually working,” she says. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

“I’ll ignore your language and just say so far, so good.”

“ Very damn good, if you ask me.”

“We can’t get crazy with this.”

“Shut up,” Norma Banks says, “and take the win.”

“That’s what my boyfriend says to me sometimes.”

She pats me on the shoulder.

“Of course he does,” she says. “One of the keys to success in this world is hanging around with people smarter than you.”

I smile into the mirror as I put the finishing touches on my face, then step back to admire my handiwork.

“So you’re saying that’s what I’m doing?”

“Fuckin’ ay,” she says.