“And I’m wasting it on you.” She straightened up and smiled so that he knew she was kidding. Even so, she caught a brief look of concern cross his face, like a wisp of a cloud crossing the sun.

“I would never keep you here,” he said.

“I will never leave.”

He pulled her from the bathroom to the bed. As always, what they did together started out slow and reverent, Jake treating her with something akin to worship, and it always ended in an animalistic frenzy, Jake taking complete control. Later, Alice would find bruises on her skin that she didn’t remember getting.

She was as happy as she had ever been. It was a month after the funeral.

When Alice was alone in the house, which was fairly often, she occasionally looked through her mother’s things, sorting through her clothes and shoes, her books, and her few mementos. Some of it Alice wanted to keep, a decent cocktail dress for example, and the Gucci bag that Edith had bought from the fancy secondhand store in Portland. But most of it was junk, and Alice would fill grocery bags with clothes, bringing them down to the condo Dumpster out back and throwing them away, a little at a time. For some reason, she didn’t want to do this in front of Jake, even though she thought it would please him. Still, he must have noticed that there were less and less of Edith’s things around, and that more and more of Alice’s things were making their way into the master bedroom.

At the bottom of the bedroom closet was an old liquor store box filled with some of the more personal effects that Edith had kept, including her Biddeford High School yearbook. Alice had seen pictures of Edith when she’d been young, but never pictures of her as a teenager. There she was in black and white, her hair in a bouffant, looking prettier than any other girl in her graduating class. Alice also found a picture of her in the cheerleaders’ squad, and one candid of her at a car wash fund-raiser. She wore tight white shorts, and a cute sleeveless top, and she was smiling, not at the camera but at another girl. Both had soap bubbles in their hair, and Edith was holding a hose. Alice couldn’t stop looking at the picture, partly because her mother looked so beautiful and so happy, but mostly because of how much she looked like Alice did now. How had she gone from that to what she became, that sloppy, drunken wreck drooling on a couch?