“We tried to telephone,” she says. I always have to surreptitiously check her nametag—Gisele Thunay-Dufresne. “What happened to your face?”

“Nothing.” I do not feel like explaining about the busker’s flute.

“Wait here while I get the correspondence we tried to send to you.”

She retrieves three cancelled envelopes, all addressed to myself, two to the Gaspé postal box whose payments I failed to keep up after Madame Blanchard left the old house to be cared for here, and one addressed to the Mission this past June while I was not yet in the city. “We knew from your instructions that this last one was unlikely to reach you.” She hands it to me. “But you gave us no alternative. We trusted someone there might know a forwarding address. I’ve warned you something like this might happen.”

She flicks a lacquered nail while I open the envelope and take in its contents.

It is true that the time Madame Blanchard fell and broke her hip, it took a couple of months before I found out. The Gisele Thunay-Dufresnes of the world believe this to be neglect on my part.

But Madame Blanchard knew I loved her.

I remind myself, here on this tiled floor that emanates a pong of Javex through the liver odour, that this is what matters.

“Where…is there…Is it the Anglican cemetery?”

“She is not in a cemetery.” Madame Thunay-Dufresne places a large brown envelope in my hand. “Here are her papers. We proceeded according to most of her wishes. I’ll have to telephone the funeral service and ask them to courier the box. I’m afraid we’ll have to transfer the courier charge to you. We’ve done all the paperwork and the cheque is in here along with the other papers. Really, we should not have had to deal with these extras. If you had been here earlier, we could have saved some of her knick-knacks for you. As it is, we have had to send most of it to Fripe-Prix Renaissance. You could have made better arrangements. If everybody did as you have done, we’d barely stay in business.”

She clacks down the hall. Suzette plugs in the plastic kettle and stirs Nescafé and coffee whitener into a cup for me. Dabs my face with a cloth, cool and damp, removing the bloody encrustation.

“I’m sorry about your loss.” She looks down the hall to make sure it’s empty, then reaches in the back of a drawer to extract a small packet. “Here. I saved this.”