“Too goddamn busy cleaning up after people at the Gale to muck around in that pit of yours.” Judging by Mama’s response, I’ve failed to scrub that comfortably chronic teenage petulance from my tone.

Her hands are planted on her hips, and her steely grey eyes drill a hole through me. Her bottom jaw juts out, teeth bared in a cross underbite, just like Peg’s mean German shepherd, Deeohgee, used to have. This is the face and posture my mother puts on if you happen to say the wrong thing when she’s already in a bit of a mood. It’s hard to tell what precipitated this particular one. It might be that she’s getting too old and arthritic to be crouching over toilets and slinging piles of fluffy bath towels, day in and day out. It might also be that I’m making her come to Reenie Walker’s funeral with me, and Peggy just called to announce that she’s tagging along, too. Then again, it might be the photo album I left on the table this morning that turned her so sour so fast. It’s still open to the one and only page that makes her spit sparks and slam the damn thing shut every time. The page I always jokingly referred to as the Hall of Shame, though Mama never laughed.

There are only two old photos on that page. One is of the Spenser family at a quaint little cottage on the Mira River, my father and his older sister — Saint Sarah as Mama always called her — flanking their parents, John Alexander and Rosalind. Their comfortable life as the Island’s entrepreneurial upper crust is neatly rendered in tight smiles, tamed hair, and the saturated colour and gloss of a 1960s Polaroid. The other photo is a tattered black-and-white of Bernie and Lucy Fortune on their wedding day in 1951. My nanny is dressed in white and glowing like she doesn’t know that she’s already three months pregnant, clueless that that child will be the first of eleven, each doomed to the their own brand of pain and chaos. She’s smiling like she couldn’t imagine the man standing beside her ever grabbing her hair and driving her face into a plate full of dinner because it was too salty. Meanwhile, Black Bernie is rumpled and scowling, his hands and cheeks marred by the indelible shadows of grease and grime from the coal pit. Anyone can see that those narrowed eyes hold flashes of the smacks and squalor to come, and his dark hair storms from the top of his head in a wild mess of defiance. Everything about him is grim and unsettling, especially next to his bride’s delicate beauty.

I park myself at the table and stare down at the photos on that page, looking for a trace of myself in the faces of family, when it dawns on me. Mama’s reason. Why she never got rid of my stuff, and why she’s hoarding dryer lint and newspaper and milk jugs. It’s the same reason she keeps pictures of people who evoke in her either scorching rage or frigid indifference. Mama doesn’t let go of anything. Not even things that cause her some measure of grief.