Abby runs into Joyce at the mailboxes and tries to avoid making conversation. Joyce thwarts that effort. "I know we argue a lot," Joyce apologizes sweetly. "We didn't mean to bother you." Abby points out that, due to Joyce's plentiful screams for help, she only did what was requested of her. "Brian and I have been together since high school," she offers. "There's a lot of history, and a lot of passion." And bloody noses. Abby obviously loathes this thin explanation. Joyce ignores this and blithely takes her leave.

Exiting on Joyce's heels, Abby watches the woman limp painfully down the front steps. "Is it your ankle?" she calls out knowingly. Joyce purses her lips, twists them into a false smile, and chirps that she's just fine, brushing off Abby's offer of help. Abby watches her new friend stagger away, awash in Egyptian river water.

Susan and Carter arrive at the hospital together, the former playing devil's advocate and suggesting how hard life must be for Eleanor right now, what with the divorce and the crow's feet and the way her voice sounds like a thousand pieces of chalk scraping the blackboard in protest. Carter isn't buying it, even with all his family riches. He makes a flip comment to the effect that Susan hasn't met his mother yet, and it has an air of "And you never will." And the writers are all, "Thank God he said it like that, because we had no idea where to go with this crappy relationship." Susan hands off a coffee to Mark, and she and Carter go about getting dolled up in their lab coats and milling around Reception. Mark, meanwhile, is on the phone trying to reach Vulcan Jen about the possibility of kicking Rachel to the curb.