Sure enough, there’s a big, bushy, six-foot cat-piss spruce strapped to the roof of Mama’s car with a half-dozen bungee cords. “Crooked as me arse, stinks already, but it was free. Beggars can’t be choosers,” she says, almost cheerfully, as she starts yanking on the cord clasps with her gloveless, gnarled hands.

Cheerful is not generally a word that describes Mama. Not even almost. So when I hear her humming a light and peppy tune as she irons her ridiculous Greeting Gale housekeeping frock, or when she wordlessly shuffles my head onto her lap and slowly, maternally runs her hands over my bristly head in the evenings as I lie on the couch yelling at the dummies on Jeopardy, or when she voluntarily calls Peggy, and the conversation doesn’t send Mama into a fit of exasperated eye rolls . . . I get suspicious.

She’s drinking more these days. Or drinking different, at least. Not getting as deep in her cups at night, but spreading her beverages out through the day in a more creative fashion. A shot of gin in her morning tea. A hot toddy after dinner. A flask of vodka tucked in the side pocket of her Greeting Gale housekeeping frock that she thinks I don’t see. Despite her unsettling cheerfulness and her looser, more leisurely alcohol consumption, Mama looks tired. Thinner. Older. Or maybe that’s just my eyes playing tricks on me. An extension of the other eye tricks that are growing more intense, more pervasive, more common when I look at Mama. More and more, I see this fog hanging above her head. Literally, a fog, thick as Peggy’s creamed seafood chowder but somehow even more unsettling. Like the worst kind of fugitive from the steel-grey stratiform clouds outside has broken into the trailer and claimed squatter’s rights to the space over Mama’s head. Every now and then, a bolt of sangria red or dirty tequila gold comes leaping out of her fog, striking the ceiling or the floor. The bulk of it moves, shifts, but it never seems to really go anywhere. I squint my eyes just right, trying to make it dance and quiver like the other squirrelly vision spells. But this thing that clings to Mama doesn’t budge. It just hangs there, smearing and smothering Mama’s spark.

“God love your mother, she looks like death warmed over,” Peggy says to me under her labouring breath as she wrestles with an ancient angel wrapped in toilet paper.

Regardless of how much of a brain-tumoury, self-centred sook I’m being, and regardless of how fake Mama’s cheerfulness is, or how real her cloud shroud is, none of it’s enough to get either of us off the hook for hosting Christmas this year. Hence the tree carcass now sprawled out on the living-room floor.

“For Christ’s sake, Peggy, make yourself useful,” Mama says, hustling into the room. She grabs the midsection of the supine tree and lurches it into upright obedience.

“Whaddya think I’m doing, unwrapping this stuff? You want these decorations or not?”