I disconnect, still looking at the painting. It might be good, but I can’t tell. I can’t see my mother’s paintings the way other people do, can’t divorce the finished product from the memory of it being painted: where we were living, where I was at school, which version of Karen I was dealing with. We were staying in a kind of artistic hippie squat when she painted this one, with an imprecise number of other people living there at any one time. No one cared what I did or where I was, nothing was ever clean and there was never any quiet. I was ten years old and I hated it. I belatedly realize the waitress is talking to me. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

She smiles. “I was saying that the artist is local. She’s quite famous, actually: Karen Innes, have you heard of her?” She waits expectantly, and I nod weakly. Karen Innes. My mother painted under her maiden name. It always seemed significant to me. “She was born here, you know.” Actually she wasn’t. She was born much farther north, near Aberdeen, where my grandparents lived until she was one or so, and to whence they returned when they retired. I don’t have any urge to set the waitress straight. “We have some postcards here”—she indicates a small stand on the end of the counter—“and there’s posters of her work in the hotel shop if you like it.”

“Bloody disgrace is what it is.” I swing round to find a shriveled woman in her sixties at the end of the counter, her pinched mouth incongruously painted in a red lipstick that clashes with her purple fleece and set in a hard line. “Look at this.” She jabs her hand sharply at the postcards. “Setting up that wee bitch as if she was Scotland’s own Picasso. Bloody disgrace.”

I hear my own shocked intake of breath even as the waitress quickly jumps in with such perfect politeness that her dislike of the woman is all the more evident. “Good morning, Morag, can I get you anything?”

Morag snorts as her head moves in an odd tremor. “You can get rid of that rubbish for a start.”

A lady in her forties is bustling up to her now. “For God’s sake, haud yer wheesht, Morag. The poor woman’s only just gone to the grave.” She turns to myself and the waitress, embarrassment and exasperation warring on her face, even as Morag mutinously mutters something that might be Hell mend her. “I’m so sorry. She had a bad night.” I’m too shocked to speak. What on earth did my mother do to incite such long-standing enmity?

“I’ve seen you before. What’s your name, hen?” asks Morag suddenly, her narrowed eyes focusing intently on me. The hen isn’t the same casual term that the locksmith used. This hen accuses.