“Suppose Mama’ d boot my arse if you came to visit and I didn’t feed ya. She was up making broc-o-glop at six o’clock this morning. Only food I haven’t puked up yet. C’mon.”

Broc-o-glop is Mama’s finest culinary masterpiece. And the horrible name is intentional. A ruse. You bring it to a pot-luck, and people say, “What’s that?” and you scrunch your nose in disgust and drawl, “Broc-o-glop.” They won’t touch it no matter how good it smells. And boom! More broc-o-glop for me. I’m not sure exactly what’s in it, but I tried to make it for Dave once and it turned out a slimy, salty, broccoli mess. I begged Mama to tell me the broc-o-glop secret, but she laughed. Said Dave didn’t deserve it, and refused to tell me. She won’t tell anyone.

She’s funny like that, just like she used to be funny about not letting anybody leave our house without being fed, whether they wanted to be or not. Whether money was tight or not. “Sit down,” she’d say. “You look ready to eat a horse and chase the driver! I’ll put another can of water on the beans.” Which I always thought was weird because the people who came to our house never looked all that hungry to me, and we never ate canned beans. She even fed Weasel Tobin dinner the day she caught us screwing in the woods. He thought she was trying to poison him. I figured out that she was up to something even more devious: trying to make me think that she liked him, banking on the hope that I’d break up with him the second I thought he had her seal of approval. Mama’s funny like that, too.

Two big bowls of broc-o-glop nuked and devoured. A good-sized fire roaring in the pit out back. The baby sound asleep. Half a bottle of posh vino consumed as we watch the sky become a blanket of star-dappled country dark. Char and I officially catch up on everything — real or imagined — that has happened since we last saw each other in the dingy basement apartment we shared in Halifax more than fifteen years ago. Before she bailed on our lease and ran away to join a psychedelic circus in Germany, which actually turned out to be a cult. But a fun cult, apparently. Not like the cult she later found herself in on the fringes of Shanghai. That one forbade booze, sex, and drugs, and encouraged members to renounce material wealth, serve others, and refrain from inflicting pain on the self, the Earth, or fellow beings. What kind of cult does that? Not a good one, by Char’s standards.

Speaking of cults, the first thing I toss on that bonfire is the handful of Viva Rica! The Essence of Inspiration! Stacey Fortune, Manager of Marketing business cards, plucked from the bag of crap they handed to me when they cleaned out my desk at the office. The cards don’t burn very well. They melt into a greasy, green, smoky glob of acrid pretense. The only other thing in that bag was a file folder I’m sure I meant to torch months ago. It contains a year’s worth of weekly rose delivery cards, schmaltzy love-note Post-its, and a wedding “vision board” from my days with Dave the Douchebag, which also burn in an equally unsatisfying manner. They flare bright, hot-orange and golden for a minute or two, then abruptly become unrecognizable, black and charred. Twenty-year-old stacks of the Cape Breton Post, on the other hand? Those babies burn beautifully! Thick, heady grey billows of smoke and ash puff from the firepit as I feed armloads of newspaper into the hungry flames.