I was thinking, instead, about the word life — and the two particular occasions my mother flung it at me in such angry exasperation that summer when I was twenty. And how, on those occasions, she managed to make it mean completely different things.

There was: This is called life!

And then there was: Your precious young life.

One representing reality, the other delusion.

Not that my life, at twenty, wasn’t precious. It just wasn’t that precious, was what she was saying — that is, not as precious as I thought. The young idealize things, they glamourize. They dream big. But then they leave home. They get student loans. They get minimum wage jobs. They get incomprehensible charges on their cell phone bills. They get cold sores — massive, festering ones that no amount of makeup can obscure. They get greasy-headed landlords who walk into their apartments and poke around when they’re not home. They get five-business-day holds put on their paycheques. They get drunk and throw up in public. They get refused service. They get yeast infections. They get groped on the subway. They get UTIs. They get obscenities yelled at them on the streets. They get plantar warts from the showers at their gyms. They get office jobs. They get tax audits. They get sexually harassed, but not enough to raise a fuss about. They get pregnancy scares. They have miscarriages. They get married, quickly, without romance, because to attempt to graft a sense of romance onto a life that has been pretty unromantic thus far, only to have it fall flat, would be worse than just adopting a wisecracking, cynical approach to romance from the get-go. They become pragmatic. They tell themselves, This is pragmatism, not cynicism. They get irritable bowel syndrome. They tell themselves, So what if it is cynicism. They get divorced. They go back to school. They feel too old to be going back to school. They get another office job with more responsibility and a pay bump, which they know should feel like a victory but does not. Their mother dies. They come home.

5

Marlene kept trying to follow up. She left bright, efficient messages on my cell phone every day at around the same time. “Hi, Karen! It’s Marlene at Gorsebrook Residential? Just following up on our meeting of Monday, June 24th, regarding placement of your sister, Kelli.”

I didn’t know what to do because the less efficient administrator at Seaside had been following up with me too, but in a more haphazard kind of way, her inquiries punctuated by a lot of long uhhhhs and backgrounded by the sounds of rapidly shuffling papers as she scrambled to remind herself who I was and why she was getting in touch. This was Deanna. And while Deanna, when I’d met her, hadn’t possessed Marlene’s air of competency, nor her clear-eyed, strong, but empathetic gaze, what did bond Deanna and me was the fact that I’d sat weeping in her office on one end of her faux-leather couch while she perched at the other end, handing me tissue after tissue and looking around occasionally as if in hope some kindly and authoritative figure would usher me from the room.