Sometimes Mom rifles through my movies, which used to be hers, holding them up and offering her nonexpert opinions. “Oh, this one is soooo good,” she might say, and then yell, “‘Give my daughter the shot!’” in her best Sally Field voice, shaking the Terms of Endearment cover. My mom and dad and I used to watch movies all the time—tons of them from every genre, starting with their own pretty substantial stash, then moving beyond that. We had movie marathon nights where we binged on everything from well-known rom-coms to cult classics to more contemporary stuff. Mom’s favorites were always the cheesy romances and tearjerkers, but she also loved a good Friday the 13th sequel. She would dig her nails into my arm and scream at every predictable scary part. She grew to love Carrie after many screenings.

I’ll never forget her saying the last time we watched it, “Poor girl. She had no choice. They forced her hand.” She even helped me transform an old white dress we found at the Woepine Benevolent Fund into Carrie’s blood-stained gown for Halloween one year. Our bathroom floor still has red in the grout between the tiles.

It felt weird at first, having a “family movie night” without my dad, but Mom tried so hard to make it fun. She went all out. Bought so many kinds of popcorn that we both felt sick halfway through the movie.

Once, she got a “Detention Pack” of DVDs for cheap, featuring Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Some Kind of Wonderful, Heathers, and The Breakfast Club. We laughed at it but watched them all the time, quoting the movies at each other, singing the songs in snippets, making references that no one else got. Mom’s a hairdresser, with a salon in our basement, so sometimes she and I would get right into it: she’d crimp and style our hair like the eighties, hair-spraying it so much we could hardly breathe. During that time, whenever one of us wanted in the bathroom, the other would shout, “Keep your tits on!”—our fav line from Carrie.

Sometimes, in those early days, I felt guilty that Dad was missing out, but I figured I could stay at his place and have a movie night there whenever he wanted.

“Eleanor’s dying to get to know you better,” he told me, about his girlfriend, “and there’s a pull-out couch for you if you want to stay over.”