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“How many times have I got to tell you it isn’t a joke?” Layla shoots back, and the chess player huffs, returning to her game even though it looks like her opponent might have hit the painkillers a little hard and blacked out early.

“What about, everybody here is waiting for someone else to die?” I suggest.

“What’s that?” Layla’s attention is back on me, her eyes following the curve of the stitches that arch around my neck as my hoodie shifts.

“Your joke,” I explain. “What’s the difference between this place and a nursing home? Instead of ‘Everybody at a nursing home is waiting to die, and we’re all waiting to live,’ you could say, ‘we’re all waiting for someone else to die.’”

I wait for a reaction, but she’s still staring. “You know, so we can get their heart.”

“Right,” she says. “I get it. I just think it’s even not-funnier than my version.”

“Oh.” I go back to looking at the books.

“Which means Nadine over there will hate it,” she adds. “So I kind of love it. Hi, I’m Layla by the way.” She offers her hand to shake.

“I gathered,” I say, taking it. “Sasha.”

Her hand is bony in mine, and I find myself making a terrible assessment of how long she has left, how much time I should invest in this friendship. Then I see the belt around her waist.

“Is that an LVAD?”

“Yeah,” she says, lifting her sweatshirt so I can see. “Mark of the last resort.”

“I get mine next week,” I tell her, and I swear I can see the same computation going on behind her dark brown eyes, a weighing of the free time she has left and if she wants to spend it with someone who won’t be around to remember anything she said or did.

“Dilated cardiomyopathy?” she asks, and I know we’re going through our second round of introductions, an exchange of diagnoses and not names.

“Yeah. Sickle cell?”

Her eyebrows shoot up. “Just because I’m black you think I’ve got sickle cell?”

“No, I . . . no,” I say, immediately backpedaling and trying to name any other heart condition I can think of, and coming up with none. “I’m . . . did I just really screw this up?”

“No, you’re just really white, that’s all.”

“Sorry,” I say. “It’s not like I’m racist or anything.”

“Not on purpose anyway,” she says, but her eyebrows have come back down so I think I might be forgiven.

“So . . .” I dig into the waistband of my pants to pull out the folded schedule of the day’s events. “Are any of these actually decent? I was thinking about the meditation one.”

Layla looks it over. “If we’re lucky, the watercolor lady might smoke a joint before she comes in and we can try to get a contact high off her hair. She thinks we like her a lot because we invade her personal space.”

“I think I’ll pass on getting high.”

“The Humane Society trips seem cool but I’m allergic, so I can’t go.” Her eyes shift to me, maybe hoping that if she’s out then I am too.

“What about the books thing?” I ask.

She shrugs. “It’s okay. Mostly a lot of people bring stuff that’s got to do with somebody dying and talk about how they can relate. I’d rather read about people falling into crazy love, something I don’t know the first thing about.”

She lets the sentence fade out, eyes still searching me. “You ever been in love?”

I let a little smile answer for me, no words necessary.

“So . . . the meditation?” I say.

Layla nods at me. “Meditation it is. You get breakfast yet?”