With all her careful administration of my sister’s every potential need, her worry over any possible discomfort her daughter might suffer, you’re telling me my mother gave no thought whatsoever to the agonies involved in un-wedging Kelli from the home she’d lived in since her girlhood? Into the bleach-fragrant hallways of what she’d always referred to as One of Those Terrible Places? A capital-I Institution? Because I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it. What I believe is that my mother thought about this eventuality deeply, compulsively. And what she envisioned, I can only conclude, is what is happening right now.

Which meant she’d left this specific agony to me. This was my inheritance. I was the one who suggested it in the first place, after all, in all my callousness. I think it might be time, Mom. I was the hardass. I was the proud, self-declared “realist.” And now — look around, daughter — it’s real. So deal with it. Deal with it the way you always wanted.

The only problem being, of course, that Gorsebrook did not have an immediate opening, and Marlene could not tell me when they would. And I had two and a half weeks left of the leave I had taken before my clients would expect me at my desk, dutifully pinging back responses to the daily slew of emails. My house, full of plants being watered by my downstairs tenant, was in a city eleven hundred miles away. And it wasn’t that I couldn’t get more time off work — working contract to contract and doing most of it from home made that easy. And it wasn’t that my tenant wouldn’t happily keep watering my plants and paying her rent by direct deposit.

If anything, it was how simple I knew it would be to remain. It had always felt easy, like falling into a hole, or rolling over in bed and going back to sleep after the alarm goes off. That’s why, I always told myself, I’d had to kick and claw so ruthlessly to get out in the first place.

Meanwhile, Marlene left messages. Deanna left messages. They were both being this diligent because of me — because I had made it clear to them I was on a schedule, I was a busy career woman who needed to get my sister taken care of so I could get back to my life.

Trevor was still in a bit of a snit when he came to walk Kelli on Friday. The screen door wheezed open and he called to her from the foyer as per usual, but this time he was all business, addressing most of his remarks to her, instead of me, while I negotiated my sister’s arms into her jacket.

“Lookin good, hot stuff! You working out?”

“Working out,” Kelli tittered.

“You are not,” I said, poking her gently in the gut. “Look at that tummy!”

“Kelli’s tummy,” agreed Kelli, liking the teasing.

“Abs of steel!” declared Trevor, glancing at me with a tight smile. “Let’s get your sneaks on, Beaner.”