There was an Australian soap on the TV so I flicked through the channels until I found the news. Mum hated soaps. She was highbrow to the point of snobbish and Dad and I always teased her for it. She and Hannah used to talk about fancy-pants things all the time. They read the same boring books with lots of wordy metaphors where nothing really happened. They watched the same boring films with lots of visual metaphors where nothing really happened. Once they even went to a concert together. Vivaldi played by Vilde Frang. I only remembered the name because I thought it sounded funny and I still don’t know if Vilde Frang is a person or a band. The same night, Dad and I had gone to an unauthorized musical version of Jennifer’s Body. It was fucking amazing to be fair, but I sometimes felt a pang of regret that I hadn’t done the things Mum wanted to do even if I hated them. There’d been moments where I wondered if she would have preferred Hannah as a daughter. When we broke up, I was glad that Mum didn’t really understand anymore, but I was angry with Hannah because it felt like she had abandoned Mum as well.

I could feel myself getting sucked into that black hole of ruminating on things I’d done wrong and honestly I could be here all day if I let that take over. As a great philosopher once said: shake it off.

“How are you, Mum?” I asked, trying to inject some lightness into my voice.

“I’m really good. Dad is picking me up soon.”

Mum often thinks she’s younger than she is. Sometimes she seems to think she’s at work. She often thinks her parents are still alive—her adoptive parents, I mean. She doesn’t remember finding out she was adopted. That didn’t happen until she was in her late twenties. It felt like her memories unraveled up to a certain point. She could tell you stories from her childhood in vivid detail, but she didn’t remember that she had a daughter. Most of the time she thought she was in her early twenties, as near as we could tell. That person was Elizabeth O’Kane. She wouldn’t even meet Rob Clarke for thirteen more years, let alone be my mother. It was like that part of her vanished. I tried to remember the last time she knew I was her daughter. But I hadn’t known it was the last time then so it hadn’t stuck out. Another memory gone, for both of us.

“That’s lovely,” I said. “What time is he coming?”

“Soon. I think. How are you? What would you like to talk about?”