Kelli watched all this activity with approval. My mother had always kept an eyelet-handkerchief thing spread out as a kind of mat beneath a lamp that sat on one of the end tables in the living room. As I was replacing it, I caught Kelli’s eye. She’d been watching me from her stool by the widow.

“Mumma,” she remarked.

“Remember this stuff, Kell?” I said.

“Mumma stuff,” said Kelli, smiling at her lap.

When this activity was finished, I accepted a rum and coke with ice that Trevor produced out of nowhere for “a job well done” and we sat in the re-doilied living room with Kelli. I had to admit, the space felt comfortable again — or at least familiar. Like we belonged in it, or to it. Like we had gathered a beloved old blanket around ourselves and were snuggling in.

Something about unboxing and replacing all those old photographs had put me in the mood to talk about Irene. I wanted to talk about how we first began to fight with one another. Because, it seemed to me, we hadn’t always fought. There was a time when Irene and I were two peas in pod. We liked the same things. We both liked the beach — just lying around on it in the summer, reading magazines, soaking up the sun, as everyone did so heedlessly in the seventies. Irene used to slather me in coconut suntan lotion to help “brown me up” because that’s what you did — no one had a notion about things like UV rays and SPF back then — and together we’d loll on towels as Kelli sat nearby in a floppy hat (unlike my mother and I, Kelli turned into a boiled lobster the moment sunlight hit her), rocking and running her hands through the sand. And my mother would always tell me how wonderful it was that I, a child, just liked to sit. I didn’t need to be up and shrieking with the other kids, frantically expending energy, hurling myself into the waves heedless of the undertow and prompting her to have to chase after me, squawking warnings, like the beleaguered, undignified parents on all sides of us. It became a point of pride with me, much as I sometimes craved to do exactly what she was describing. If I wanted to go into the water, I strolled casually down to the surf, like a woman in no hurry, as opposed to the eager, vivacious kid I was. When I dove beneath the surface, I kicked and flailed with abandon, tiring myself out, so that afterwards I could amble composedly back up the beach to flop down at my mother’s side for another languorous, coconut-scented hour or so. She told me I was the ideal companion.

I was the ideal companion at church for a while too. My mother and I both loved to sing; we’d share a hymnal and belt out whatever song had been chosen by the choir that day, which you were not really supposed to do — belt, that is. At least, that was the impression I got from the side-eye of the surrounding parishioners. After all, there was already a choir there to do the singing — the congregation was just expected to sort of murmur and sigh along, staying more or less in tune, not joyously raise our voices to the heavens. We were Catholics, after all, not Southern Baptists or evangelicals, which is just a way of saying that in our tradition, pleasure-taking and church-going were two things that were not supposed to go together. But my mother and I didn’t care. We sang our hearts out, pushing our mutually thin, quavering voices to their limits. We sang “Yahweh, You Are Near” and “I Am the Bread of Life,” and my favourite, the weird, droney-then-triumphant “God’s Spirit Is in My Heart,” the chorus of which was too high-pitched for my single-octave voice, strictly speaking, but I shrieked it out anyway. My mother and I always sang the abrupt, exuberant chorus with exclamation points.