Nanny got sick and went into the hospital before I got a chance to give it to her. I was livid that nobody would take me in to see her. I knew from the hushed voices and red eyes of everyone around me that she was dying. Still, I wrapped the brooch up in a brown paper lunch bag and sent it to the hospital with Mama. Mama went on about how she adored it, how it made her feel better, brightened her right up. Nanny died two days later. They wouldn’t let me go to her funeral, so I spent hours imagining it: Nanny looked happy and peaceful with the peacock brooch pinned over her heart for eternity. But now there it is, clinging to the centre of Peggy’s gelatinous bosom. And it’s pinned on crooked.

“Oh! ’Member this thing? Fortune family heirloom, what.” Peggy laughs, chest heaving, fingering the brooch when she notices me staring. “Surprised none of them cheap little rhinestones fell off, even after all these years. Look, the gold paint ain’t even peeling.”

“How’d you get that?”

“Didn’t try to steal it, like a certain someone who shall remain nameless. But I’ll look at that party and whistle.” Her painted sausage lips scrunch into an O, and she lets out a long trill as she pitches as far toward me as her seat belt will allow.

“Don’t be a quiff all your life, Peggy. Take a day off,” I say in my most pleasantly passive-aggressive tone, with the tightest of smiles.

“Listen, I’ll leave you both here on the side of the road if there’s any more snark.” Mama’s foot hits the gas pedal harder.

“For your information,” Peggy says, “after Ma died, a nurse found a paper bag under her pillow and was about to toss it in the trash, but I stopped her. Thought you’d get a kick out of seeing it. You want it back?”

“No.” I try to ignore the green-grey zigzags that are suddenly reducing my field of vision to pinholes.

“Good,” Peggy snorts, “because it’s the only thing holding my blouse shut.”

There are two things I now know for certain I do not want at my funeral: family brawls and flowers that smell like cat piss. To be fair, the reeking chrysanthemums were not Allie’s fault, even though she blames herself. Reenie’s funeral plan was very specific in that there should be as many potted flowers as possible crammed into the church, and that they should come from Bridie at Nicholson’s Greenhouse. What Reenie could not have anticipated was that by the time she died, her dear friend Bridie Nicholson would be in the throes of dementia and housing a dozen or so rescued cats in her greenhouse along with the plants. And that Reenie’s sons would be too stunned to notice that the chrysanthemums smelled like cat piss when they picked them up and proceeded to pack them into the church. Thank God the minister lit up some holy incense.