But Trevor’s victory, such as it was, meant he was back on board. His smile loosened up, and he leaned forward again, arms on his knees. He was invested in our lives once more, just as he’d been the moment he placed his hand on my mother’s lawnmower and took it over from me.

What was wrong with you, friends always ask when I get to this part of the story.

6

I hate this house.

The feeling sat there in the background of my morning like a burgeoning fever. Like when you wake up just a little bit sick, and you decide I’m not sick, and get up like nothing’s wrong and just keep going about your business. But as the day ticks on you start to understand you’re doomed — that the infection is about to boil over. I’d been ignoring this feeling, this sickness, I realized later, from the moment I arrived.

I’d ignored it throughout my non-productive weekend. I had been fully intending to undertake the dreary obligation of cataloguing my mother’s stuff over those two days — mentally separating what could be hauled away versus what could be put aside for the eventual, inevitable yard sale. But before I could even get started, I got hung up sifting through old photo albums and shoeboxes also filled with photographs — photographs my mother had deemed unworthy of the album, but still worth keeping, for some reason. I’d gone through the shoeboxes figuring I’d decide what pictures to throw away, but instead I spent the entire weekend poring over them, gazing at them, showing them to Kelli. Blurred faces and awkward expressions. Half-shut eyes, hanging-open mouths. Each photo held an ugly, imperfect fascination. They weren’t exactly us, but neither were the pictures in the album us — the smiling, perfectly posed versions. We were somewhere in the middle, between the shoeboxes and the album; the grotesque and the ideal. I could see why my mother couldn’t bring herself to throw the shoebox snaps away.

At the end of the process, during which Kelli and I barely went outside, I put all the photographs back and returned the shoeboxes to the closet where Irene had kept them stacked for decades.

Maybe I should’ve been taking Kelli for walks, or drives down to the waterfront. But the fact was there was something about my mother’s subdivision that discouraged going out. There were barely any sidewalks, for one thing. There was a small lake at the bottom of the hill, ringed by a walking path, and I had, in the past, taken Kelli walking down there once or twice, but the hill was so steep that the prospect of walking back up it after a stroll around the lake with Kelli and her bad knee made the whole thing a non-starter. Plus, the entrance to the path was at a busy street across from the Superstore — you had to dart across it, dodging traffic, to get to the lake. And Kelli had never been much for darting.