“Minnie spoils me,” says Heidi Anderson. “She takes me to Cindy’s for dinner. For a hot fudge sundae.”

“They’re huge,” says her friend Minnie Gallant. “I can only see this much of her over the top.”

“What else, Heidi? What did we get last week at Wal-Mart?”

Heidi pauses. She tries to remember. When asked to recall something, she often seems momentarily puzzled, but she usually comes up with the answer if given enough time.

“Walkie-talkies. I talk to Colleen.”

Colleen Casey is the house manager at the group home in North Scituate where Heidi lives with five other adults who have disabilities.

“Why did you need walkie-talkies?” asks Minnie.

“Oh, the badge,” says Heidi, as she touches the plastic South Kingstown police badge pinned to her chest. “I’m a cop, you know.”

Heidi, 51, has been in the care of Re-Focus for 30 years. It’s a nonprofit human-service agency that maintains 14 group homes in Rhode Island and supportive services for the adults with disabilities who live in them.

Born with Down syndrome, Heidi lived at home with her family until her parents died. “They’re at the cemetery,” she says. According to Colleen, Heidi was about 9 when her mother died and perhaps 14 when her father died. Though she has five brothers, they were too young to take responsibility for their sister, and she was sent to the Ladd School.

“It’s gone. Cooke Drive now,” says Heidi, meaning the group home where she has lived for the past 2½ years.

“I met Heidi through Colleen,” says Minnie, a 46-year-old nurse at South County Hospital, a mother of four who lives in Wakefield with her husband and their daughter, Abby, 21. “Colleen and I have been friends forever.”

“At first I would just take Heidi to Cindy’s [a diner in Johnston]. Then we decided maybe we could do a sleepover. So we fixed up a room for you here, right? Heidi likes her privacy.” At the group home she shares a room with Kitty (she snores, says Heidi) and her cat, Jelly.

“What do you do when you’re here, Heidi?”

“I sleep over.”

“She watches movies; she likes crossword puzzles; sometimes we play cards.”

“My husband enjoys her. Abby loves her. My friends ask about her. She gives me a lot more than I ever give to her. I do the same things I would do with my other friends: I take her shopping and to the movies and to the beach and to Benny’s.

“I have seen such a change in her. I used to order her meal at Cindy’s, and now she does it. Last time we went to Wal-Mart, she actually talked to the woman in line in front of us — a complete stranger. She told her she got walkie-talkies.

“It’s not a regular relationship, and I know there’s a lot of people who couldn’t or wouldn’t do it.

“This is a long-term commitment. If I don’t see her, I miss her, and so do Abby and my husband, and even the girl who does her nails will say, ‘When’s Heidi coming again?’ Everyone just likes her.”

Heidi had been sitting in the living room with Abby, watching the Three Stooges on YouTube.

“Are you having fun?” asks Minnie.

“A blast!” says Heidi.

cgrosch@projo.com