“I hope you’re right,” I said.

“I’m sure she’ll be all settled down by the time you get home,” said Trevor. “But you might wanna grab a can of Febreze or two while you’re there — ha, ha.”

“Ha, ha,” I said, heading into the Household Products section.

· · ·

She was not all settled down by the time I got home. She was on the toilet, rocking and moaning. Her face was pink and sweaty. Her pants were around her ankles and I saw that they’d been soiled.

“Oh, Kelli,” I said, crouching down beside her.

“Kelli’s tummy!”

“I’m so sorry, dear.” I held my nose with one hand and flushed the toilet with the other. The smell had hit me the moment I’d stepped into the foyer, despite the fact that Trevor had propped the door open, along with every window in the house.

I felt her forehead using my whole palm. It was hard to tell if she had a fever — the exertion itself could’ve been making her hot. She glanced up at me with desperate, glassy eyes.

The only window Trevor had not opened, it seemed, was the one in the bathroom, so I went over and cranked it. Trevor hadn’t come in here with Kelli, he’d simply kept the bathroom door open a crack to speak soothingly to her as she struggled. The women from Bestlife were the ones who gave Kelli baths and dealt, when required, with bathroom issues, but Trevor’s role in Kelli’s care had always been more about exercise and socializing. This was new territory for him.

I told Kelli to hang tight and went back to the foyer for my bags of diapers and Imodium, which I had dropped when I heard my sister moaning. Trevor was waiting for me outside the door.

“Looks bad, eh?”

“Yup. I think she’ll be missing dinner tonight.”

“Tragedy!” joked Trevor solemnly. “You know it’s bad when.”

“I see she messed her pants a little.”

“Sorry about that,” said Trevor. “I didn’t realize the gravity of the situation — didn’t get her to the toilet quite in time.”

“At least . . . is her chair ok?” In all my mother’s life as Kelli’s parent, she’d never, as far as I knew, permitted shit or vomit to get anywhere other than on clothes (which was rare enough), or in the toilet, where both bodily effusions belonged. I couldn’t stand the idea that in under just a month of my care, Kelli’s actual excrement might have been permitted to sully an actual piece of furniture in my mother’s eternally pristine living room. Fresh bread and lavender, those were supposed to be the smells. The only smells. So that a wrecked child like Jessie Madatall could step across the threshold feeling she had entered a sun-drenched sanctuary of decency and light. Not a place of shit-smeared furniture, in other words.

Trevor placed both hands on my shoulders.

“Hey, now,” he said. “The chair’s just dandy. Fresh as a daisy.”