I never knew what was going to throw me off. There was no way to predict. I could spend a dry-eyed afternoon boxing up my mother’s clothes and jewellery, breathing in the ghost of some decades-old perfume that inhabited the fibres of her cardigans and twin-sets, thinking about nothing in particular, it seemed — nothing sad, nothing bad — for hours on end. Then an advertisement for life insurance — not even on TV but on the radio, for god’s sake — might hit me like a truncheon. The tinkling music, the thoughtful, considerate words calculated to reassure. We know. We understand. The aural equivalent of a pat on the hand — not even a particularly sincere pat on the hand — could lay me out for hours.

And that’s what Marlene at Gorsebrook’s voice was like too — a hand on mine. I sat there sniffling on the phone, exasperated with myself. To be so randomly fragile when I had so much shit to figure out. I apologized to Marlene for all the time I was taking up with my blubbering and pausing to blow my nose every five minutes. But really I wanted to tell her: This is your fault. Please stop talking in that way that you are talking. Can you please stop fucking cradling me with your voice.

Trevor stuck around for a while after Kelli’s walk on Tuesday because there was baseball on TV. My mother had at some point purchased a massive flatscreen and it turned out she had a subscription that included all the sports channels, which, Trevor explained, grinning like a naughty boy, “she was nice enough to let me peep at every now and then.” I’d been surprised by the TV, and even more surprised when I’d discovered the Cadillac of a cable package she’d purchased to go with it, because my mother had taken a dim view of television when I was growing up. TV wasn’t, as she used to say, “improving.” Also it had too much “smut.” But I supposed, as her mobility declined, and once she learned she could get BBC and curling on the upper channels, a lifetime of looking askance at “the idiot box” was out the window.

Trevor invited my sister and me to join him in the rec room, but Kelli was comfortably lodged in her spot at the window and daytime TV had never been part of her routine. So even though it was only a little after eleven in the morning, I grabbed two of the remaining beers and passed one to Trevor as I joined him in front of the looming screen.

He cracked the beer without missing a beat, tossing me a wink. “Playing hooky today, are we?”

Trevor had opted for Kelli’s red recliner. He hoisted the footrest and sprawled comfortably backward as if the chair had been made for him. It had a cup holder Kelli never used, into which Trevor deposited his beer.

I remembered the Christmas my mother bought the chair for Kelli. It was probably the most expensive piece of furniture in the house except for a couple of inadvertent hand-me-down antiques. Kelli never required much at Christmas — she was happy to just rip paper off presents — soft candy, or stuffed animals that would warble a tune when their stomachs were pressed were always the biggest hits. But this one year my mother got it in her head that “Kelli deserves a good chair,” and she shopped for the thing like I had never seen my frugal mother shop for anything in her life, going from showroom to showroom, depositing a no doubt grousing Kelli into one potential throne after another. At last a cranberry La-Z-Boy carried the day — massive and garish and completely out of place with the rest of the furniture. But also kind of glorious. To this day it took a combination of bribery and threats to pry Kelli off her window-perch stool with the balding upholstery and get her downstairs to sit in it.