“Maybe you should hit up the Spensers to pay for whatever fancy memorial you think you deserve, Crow,” Peggy chimes. “God knows those people made a bomb on the backs of the rest of us plebes.”

I start down the hall to my room, to get out of this relic of a funeral dress and into something more comfortable. Like solitude. And silence. There’s a loud tapping of Peggy’s never-worked-a-day-in-her-life manicured nail on the plastic veneer that holds in place the photos before her, meant to draw my attention but I just keep going.

“Funny, I never noticed how much Crow looks like the Spensers, don’t she Mossy?” He, of course, doesn’t answer.

“Except for that hair. That’s the Old Man on the spot, isn’t it?” Peggy’s voice booms, her fingernail taps harder and louder on the album page. Then her loud, guttural laugh echoes down the hallway. “Black Bernie Fortune and that silver-tongued Spenser fella will never die as long as Crow’s alive.”

4 IF YOU CAN’T TAKE THE HEAT, GET OUT OF THE KITCHEN PARTY

From the kitchen window, all I can see is the suffocating snarl of Mama’s rambling rose bush, a yellowing sea of overgrown grass, and the skeletons of spruce trees that have seen better days. It didn’t used to be like this. This land used to feel spacious and green and alive. But just like the inside of the trailer, the outside has morphed into a jumbled mess of things that should have been pruned, pulled, and purged a long time ago. Part of me feels compelled to feng shui the fuck out of this grubby little shack and start planning a landscaping makeover that I’ll probably never get to enjoy, but that Mama will appreciate. Instead, I’m going to slash a path through the overgrown grass, find the old bonfire pit, and start burning stuff. Tree branches. Newspapers. Memories. She’s all going up in flames tonight.

It takes me three hours, six minor injuries, and four hundred and fifty-eight curse words, but I do it. I find the old bonfire pit and yank away the tired, tangled vegetation that had swallowed the circle of hefty beach rocks. I lug a dead tree from a corner of the backwoods, and set it beside a pile of newspaper lugged from the corners of the living room. I tuck a wad of ancient dryer lint and yellowed grass inside a little stick teepee in the centre of the stone circle. Spray it with twenty-year-old hairspray, just for fun. I gently cradle Mama’s Zippo lighter in the palm of my hand. With the sun just beginning to set and Mama working the night shift, I’ll have myself a merry little bonfire here. The first one since the summer I left. No s’mores and weenie roasting, but I’ve got a 1995 Shiraz that I bought at the snotty Toronto sommelier thing one of my Tinder conquests dragged me to, just days before Tumourpocalypse. I’m sure it will taste deliciously ironic when I slug it straight from the bottle in front of my Cape Breton backwoods junk fire.