Trevor kept up this banter, studiously ignoring me, right up to the moment he ushered her out the door — only then calling over his shoulder, “I’ll have her home before midnight, Mother!”

While they were gone, I went to the kitchen and dug through the cupboards to assess the cookie situation. There was still half a tin of oatcakes (because nobody in the world ate these sugarless horrors except my mother — even Kelli would hesitate if they were put before her), and a handful of Irene’s shortbreads, and there was the bag of store-bought chocolate chip that were Kelli’s reward when she was being well behaved. Otherwise things were few and far between on the homemade front, so after I’d scattered the remaining shortbreads and a couple of oatcakes for ballast onto one of the good china plates, I sat and browsed my mother’s recipe books, waiting for Trevor and my sister to return.

The screen door wheezed open about twenty minutes later. “We’re back from the pub!” hollered Trevor. “Had to drag this one off the dance floor!”

I came to the top of the stairs and saw that Trevor, for all his bluster, was gazing out the window at his truck while Kelli kicked off her shoes. He saw me in his peripheral vision, but didn’t turn his head.

“Kettle’s on,” I said.

Trevor looked up and waved his clipboard at me. “If I can just get your John Hancock, Madam?”

“Kelli,” I said. “Wanna have a cup of tea with Trebie?”

It didn’t take much. It took very little, in fact. But what was strange was how instinctual it all was — I knew exactly what to say and do for Trevor to forgive me. It was like a script we’d both memorized in advance.

It’s not that I was even thinking in these terms at the time — none of my behaviour was strategic, I couldn’t have plotted a strategy at that moment if I tried. I was a creature of compulsion and nerve endings in those days, boneless. I felt like a jellyfish, blobbing along in the ocean — a cow flop of protoplasm that recoiled when touched but otherwise veered wherever unseen currents propelled it.

I knew through my nerve endings that when Trevor, in all his chilly reluctance, climbed the stairs, he would be receptive to the sight of me in my mother’s sunny kitchen, going over her cookbooks, planning to replenish her obligatory nice-lady stocks of shortbreads and sugar cookies. I had left the books out on the kitchen table for that reason.

I knew, also, that Trevor was not a man who could turn down a proffered cup of tea. That was the traditionalist in him, the slavish follower of Maritime social etiquette — he could no more turn his nose up at tea than he could a rye or two with a buddy after work.

And I knew that confessing to Trevor, as I did midway through the tea, that I had no one else to discuss my sister’s future with, was the coup de grâce, would thaw him out once and for all.