I’d be lying if I said I’m not relieved as Allie details her return and her plans to be back in Cape Breton for the foreseeable future. If there’s one person besides Mama I’d want by my side to hold my hand, kiss my forehead, and tell me it’s okay to let go, it is Allie. Allie understands the slow-motion betrayals of a sick body. Allie can stomach suffering. Allie will help me die.

My phone slips from my increasingly clumsy hand and into the pile of dank, dusty stuffed animals I shoved to the floor when I arrived thirty-six hours ago. I can’t be bothered to dig for it now because the morning cacophony of physical and sensory chaos has begun. The faded collage of magazine ads and rock god posters plastered on my bedroom wall becomes an amorphous blur. A jackhammer headache ramps up in jig time, and my stomach clenches into a wretched knot of nausea. I try to stand up in the beats between my head’s pounding and my gut’s lurching. With a spinning head and ringing ears, the first two tries don’t pan out so well, but the third time’s the charm. I’m on my unsteady pegs. Upright. Feeling like I might barf. Sorry Mama. That laundry is going to have to hang itself.

I teeter down the hall and into the kitchen, focusing on the repeating pattern of wheat sheaves and horseshoes on the linoleum floor to steady my balance. Through half-squinted eyes, I watch in the wobbling shadows as Mama’s thick, sturdy legs stride toward the phone mounted on the wall by the kitchen table, and it takes me a minute to realize that the phone has been ringing. Which goes to show how screwy my brain’s processing is and how loud my tinnitus gets, because Mama’s got the phone ringer volume set on stun. I see Mama’s lips move, but struggle to sync up her mouth with the words because of the lime-green squiggles and blushes of dusky red moving in sweeping circles around her head. More delightful distractions courtesy of the foreign invader in my sensory cortex. Another reminder that this body, this brain, these perceptions of mine are not to be trusted.

Speaking of things not to be trusted, it is Aunt Peggy on the phone. There is only one reason Peggy ever calls Mama. Probably the only reason Peggy ever calls anyone. She must have dirt. Peggy isn’t smart enough to be a real criminal, and she’s too lazy to be a proper lunatic. To compensate for those failures, she puts all she’s got into being a pogey-scammer, as well as a nasty, gossipy big mouth.

Mama fields Peg’s urgent dirt calls at all hours of the day and night. There was the three a.m., “Effie! They just arrested Boots Johnson on the DUI. Drunk as a skunk, down past the gas station in The Mines. He never was any good. I could tell by the smell of him!” And the crack of dawn, “Effie! Milly Pike’s house got broken into. Made off with all her OxyContin.” Then twenty minutes later, “Effie! Update! They found that little MacKeigan one, not Squirrel’s daughter, the other one. The one who don’t wear bras and always has her arse crack hanging out the back of her drawers. Face down in the field down behind that skater park with B&E gloves and an empty pill bottle. Tsk tsk tsk.”