It hadn’t even occurred to me the barbecue would be a problem to figure out. I had assumed, in my blithe eighteen-year-old way, it would be simple. I assumed that in the way an eighteen-year-old who has never even attempted a given task, but has seen lots of other people do it lots of other times, always will. Just think of all the confidence we start out with, all the certainty. And then we embark and we fail, much to our surprise. And then we fail at something else, and something else, and gradually the surprise dwindles and soon we are surprised by nothing and thus are made adults.

So I cranked up the propane and my boyfriend leaned in, weaving a little from the illicit beer he’d smuggled in at my request, lighter in hand.

And everything I’ve listed above, everything I disliked about my mother’s house, had a story behind it like that. Except maybe the fluorescent lighting in the kitchen. I hated the fluorescent lighting just because I hated the fluorescent lighting and I never understood why my mother did not. The pitiless white glare never bothered her. It’s because I need to see, she would always argue, a reasonable enough argument I guess. It’s the kitchen and I need to see.

The problem wasn’t Kelli. That is, the problem was Kelli, Kelli was always the baseline problem, but in this case she wasn’t the immediate problem. Kelli had in fact been a dream to live with these last few days, something I was grateful for, not knowing what kind of emotional state I’d be walking into in the aftermath of our mother’s death, or how it might manifest itself with respect to Kelli’s ever-changing moods. Because you never did know with Kelli. She could be sanguine in the face of utter turmoil, as she had been at our mother’s wake — smiling and rocking at all the old friends and relatives coming up to say a tearful hello to her — yet you could walk into the living room and find her inconsolable on her perch by the window for no good reason, a keening, snot-dribbling puddle. But ever since I’d come home, Kelli had been on a fairly even keel. I didn’t take that for granted. There’d been times, in the past, when Kelli would wake me or my mother up several times a night for no other reason than to tell us she wasn’t asleep, and there had been times when Kelli’s digestion went completely offline, requiring the copious use of adult diapers and the washing machine running 24/7, and there had been times when Kelli got mulish and sullen and would refuse to do anything you asked of her, including, always most alarmingly, to come to the table and eat.

But no, Kelli wasn’t the immediate problem this time around. The problem was just that I woke up one morning and it felt like the house had grown teeth.

I decided I should go out, by myself, somehow. Just for an afternoon. But the moment I started applying my mind to that puzzle, by which I mean the Gordian knot of what to do with Kelli, the trapped feeling intensified and the fluorescent kitchen lighting seemed to crackle with fresh intensity as if, somehow, it had been fed.