Up until now my desperation had made me cautious beyond anything else. But caution didn’t seem to be getting me anywhere. The afternoon felt like a spider’s web — fleeing was impossible, staying still was doom. But you had to do something. Something that wasn’t quite either of those options.

Around three thirty I suggested we have a drink. Trevor grinned and rubbed his forehead.

“Little early,” he said.

“Just one before dinner,” I said. “We’ll be civilized about it.”

Trevor winked and stood up, rubbing his hands together. “Good thing Rini’s not around to see this.” This was a continuance of the one-sided conversation he’d been having with me the last hour or so. His days of splendour with Irene — barbecues, weekly doctor’s appointments and trips to the mall, drives out to Peggy’s Cove or Lawrencetown Beach on weekends, to give Irene and Kelli a nice oceanside walk and hit of salt air. At one point he came over and knelt beside my chair, pulling his phone out of his back pocket to show me some photos he’d taken over the past year. I stiffened as he approached. The photos were all selfies, the perspective always from the end of Trevor’s extended arm. No one else had ever been asked to take these pictures. His other arm was usually around my mother, if not Kelli too — and Kelli, of course, was always reluctant, always cutting her eyes away from the camera.

My mother looked shrunken beneath his arm. In a photo taken in front of the Peggy’s Cove lighthouse, she was wearing the oversized Jackie O sunglasses she favoured and her white hair streamed across her face in the wind. Her mouth was the only thing remotely expressive, remotely readable, in that photo. Somewhat puckered, as if she had been in the middle of remarking Oh! Or No.

“Did she use to get at you for your drinking?” I asked.

Trevor paused on his way to the kitchen. “Oh, you know your mum. She might not say anything, but you knew when she disapproved.”

Bullshit, I thought as he went into the kitchen. When Irene disapproved, you heard about it. She knew how to make herself heard. She may have made passive aggression a high art when dealing with me, but she’d always been an enthusiastic lodger of complaints — she wrote letters to MPs, MLAs, various newspapers back when people did that sort of thing. Her letters were always direct, grammatical, and well reasoned to a fault. She began by listing her credentials — a widow, a former nurse, a lifelong Nova Scotian (such bona fides were important to Nova Scotians) a full-time caregiver and single mother of two splendid girls. I have earned, her written preambles always seemed to declare, this small, particular instance of complaint. Hear me and I will trouble you no more.

Of course, no one did that these days. All the rules of engagement as Irene once understood them, of carefully staking out one’s status and accompanying worthiness to speak, were out the window — I couldn’t even think when, exactly, this had happened, it had been so quick and so complete. Letters to the editor got replaced by barbarous comments sections, furious tweets. My mother was a fighter, but these days she’d be like a Marquess of Queensberry boxer tossed into an Ultimate cage-fighting match. She’d been taught to fight a certain way. She hadn’t been told there were other options. And she certainly was never told how to fight against someone who threw the rule book out, who cheated, who was no gentleman and could not be trusted to fight clean. Thinking about it made me furious on her behalf.