Mom turned to me, the outside of her cheek puckering as she gnawed on the inside. She was all red: red lips, red blush, reddish hair wound into a bun. Rushing red blood. Practically taunting him. ‘Language, please.’

I said the same thing but with heck.

She sighed, because she knew what I was implying. ‘It’s a symbolic thing, Sydney.’ I knew it was a symbolic thing. I just sometimes liked to say stuff I wasn’t really thinking. Because I was actually thinking about the corpse of my dad being lowered from the ceiling on a swing, singing a soulful rendition of Rainbow Connection with Miss Piggy.

Mom looked me up and down. Just as stoic as I was; she wouldn’t cry here either. ‘Straighten your skirt, honey. You’re all crooked.’

I didn’t know where I was crooked, but I believed her – she knew more about skirts than I did – so I did some miscellaneous smoothing until she seemed satisfied. I wasn’t sure why she cared. (‘Well, yes, the service was lovely, but that girl’s lower half was a bit off-centre, don’t you think?’)

‘I’m gonna fix myself up before everyone gets here,’ she said. ‘Do you want to come?’ She wasn’t asking me to come so much as she was suggesting I should.

‘I don’t need to fix myself up.’

Mom was about to protest but seemed to be informed by Dad’s ghost that she should drop it, and walked off alone, the ugly carpet dulling the tap of her stilettos to a thud.

Crawford Funeral Home was completely depressing. Because of the light, I think. It was a sickly yellow, leaking on to stiff-looking armchairs and fake potted plants and paintings of places more beautiful than here. The paintings were the only indication that a world existed outside that place; there were windows, but they were the approximate size and shape of a keyhole, and something about the awful baroque pattern on the walls made it seem like they were slowly closing in on you. I wasn’t claustrophobic often, but in here, each breath felt itchy and earned. That might’ve been the intention, though – to make you feel like you were the one about to be buried.