’Course you do! To know me is to love me!

Kelli kept chattering away as I came down the hall, repeating the new name in the rapid-fire way she had when something got her excited. HiTrebieHiTrebieHiTrebie.

My sister only has a few things she likes to say — her “catchphrases,” my father used to call them — so when they change, when you hear Kelli uttering something entirely new, it feels odd, like a cool hand landing on your shoulder out of nowhere. Like when you know a stranger’s in the house because the air has shifted with an influx of new pheromones, the dust eddies suddenly swirling around in entirely different formations.

Of course, there was a stranger in the house. Besides me, I mean.

He was my sister’s walker. Every Tuesday and Friday at ten in the morning, Trevor and Kelli took a poky, meandering turn around the neighbourhood together. He’d been on vacation, he explained, which was why we hadn’t seen Trevor before now. And which was why Gisele had been the one walking Kelli the previous week.

Nothing in Kelli’s World! had told me to expect a man. The bathers were all women and the silver-haired Wheelies had operated according to a quaint boy/girl protocol: he stayed with the car while she knocked lightly, announced herself with a musical call of Din-din! and set a tray before my vibrating-with-happiness sister. Later, looking over Kelli’s World!, the only notation I could find on Trevor’s Tuesday and Friday mornings were the letters BL — Irene’s abbreviation for Bestlife, the home care agency she used.

He didn’t wear scrubs — none of the Bestlife people did — but if he hadn’t told me he was a worker, I probably would have assumed it. There was something about his stance in particular: I am professional, it assured me; sanctioned. He’d also figured out a way of dressing that spoke of an office issuing orders somewhere. I think it was in the colours he chose — light khaki pants, a creamy yellow T-shirt, sunny and bright to distract from his dual vocational gloom-clouds of illness and infirmity, pulled over muscles that had been sculpted just enough to let you know they were there. Gingerish hair buzzed down to bristles. Of course, the clipboard was the accessory that put the whole outfit over the top.

He still had a grin on his face when I arrived at the top of the stairs, the playful grin he wore to banter with Kelli. But his mouth went slack and round at the sight of me and for a moment he looked irritated by his own confusion. I gave him an apologetic smile. It was clear no one had told him of our mother’s death.

I’d already put on tea, so I took it off the stove, fished some cookies from a tin, and invited him to sit with us upstairs. Kelli seemed delighted by this. It wasn’t just that cookies in the a.m. weren’t the norm, but the home care workers, who in her mind I suppose comprised her circle of intimates, were not usually encouraged to socialize beyond what duty required. Kelli grinned and whispered into her lap as Trevor lowered himself into a chair across from her. There was no getting around the fact that my sister had been in tremendous spirits ever since our mother’s death. Irene’s absence hadn’t yet taken hold in Kelli, as far as I could tell — all she understood for the moment was that she was surrounded by novelty. Her sister being home, for example. A swirl of relatives she hadn’t seen in years bringing her plates of food, the afternoon of the wake. And now a tea party with her good friend Trebie.