The breath I draw through my nose rushes in deep and audible, inflating me with the kind of determined courage that would make Mama proud, if it weren’t being used to do something that would make her have a conniption fit.

“You know the Spensers’ place? Big house up on the hill?” I ask.

“Indeed I do,” he says.

“There,” I say.

“Good, dear, good,” he says.

And God love Roger for not letting me go out in the cold in my pretty black dress. He gives me the Toronto Maple Leafs toque and the giant green cable knit sweater that he keeps in the back seat in case of emergency. They go great with my hot, sparkly gloves.

When I ring the ornate doorbell of the big fancy house on the big fancy hill, I am told by the golden-haired, sour-faced, beige-suited woman at the door that Rosalind Spenser is not here. She’s dead. Just yesterday she succumbed to the cancer that had chased her for decades. I give my condolences. It occurs to me that the woman at the door must be my father’s sister, Sarah. I tell her who I am.

“Oh,” is her tight, flat response.

“I’d like to talk. May I come in?” I say, using my best professionally persuasive face to offset the air of lunacy surely exuded by the Leafs toque, oversized sweater, rhinestone gloves, and trampy black dress I’m sporting.

“If you must.”

This is the woman who stood beside my father at the cottage in the Hall of Shame picture from Mama’s photo album, with her long, pin-straight hair, her pressed and pleated baby blue sundress, and only the tips of her perfect teeth peeking out from between cagily parted lips. She was the lithe, glamourous guardian of the little boys in blue suits, who wouldn’t look at me. She acted like I wasn’t even there on that Christmas Eve when I was eight. Sarah Spenser is pushing sixty now but has done her damnedest to make sure that the march of years didn’t leave any trail on her face. Her hair is carefully shaded with pale blonde camouflage. There is smooth, taut skin where her crow’s feet and smile lines ought to be, and there’s not enough fat on her to grease a skillet. By the looks of things, she’s applied the same aesthetic ethos to the old family home. Erased its lines, its age, its history, and left only the bare bones. Crystal chandeliers and glass cabinets with expensive tchotchkes must have smacked of déclassé excess. Instead of an opulent hum of voices and music, cinnamon scents and warm firelights, the house is eerily silent, and engulfed by the smell of fresh paint and new plastic. Under Saint Sarah’s watchful blue eyes, the Spenser house has been made smooth and modern, and I can’t help but think she might have knocked back a bottle of celebratory champagne on the night her mother died. Alone.