“I’m just sorry as all shit,” Trevor repeated one or two times, after I’d told him. He sat in a low chair with his toned, freckled arms dangling between his legs.

“Yes,” I said. “It was a — well, it wasn’t actually a shock, I guess.”

I was lying. It was a shock, but it wouldn’t have made sense for me to say so. My mother had been preparing me for this eventuality, mentally at least, since her diagnosis and subsequent mastectomy some ten years ago. But it was still a shock.

“She was such a nice lady,” said Trevor. I’d heard these six words so many times in almost as many days. It sounded like easy lip service, just a thing you say when an old woman dies, but I knew it wasn’t, because whenever it was spoken to me, it was spoken in tones of astonishment, even awe — that’s how Trevor was saying it now. My mother had achieved an ideal of decent, patient, competent yet soft-spoken nice-ladyhood I think very few people encounter anymore. Everyone always experienced my mother as a rare exotic, an antique, somewhere between a concertina and a California condor.

When I didn’t reply, Trevor nodded his head, as if agreeing with himself. “One nice fuckin lady.”

“Nice fuckin lady,” concurred Kelli, in parrot mode. She only did that with people she liked.

It made me smile to imagine my mother and Trevor in conversation, because my mother was decorous above all else. When necessary, she’d be decorous on other people’s behalf — she’d certainly been on my behalf enough. So I could imagine her overlooking Trevor’s unselfconscious profanity just as she’d overlooked the indelicacies of countless others in her decorous lifetime. Yet my mother was nice in the tradition of many a Nova Scotian lady of her generation and upbringing — it could be a stiff, dogmatic niceness of the schoolmarm stripe, a niceness of propriety and parochialism outlined with a filigree border of intolerance. I may as well come out and say that my mother could be irredeemably racist in that same nice-lady way, but even so, manners came first and she set great store in “keeping one’s opinions to oneself.” Once when I was visiting, the Sri Lankan family that had moved in down the street invited her to a party for a newborn baby (“I suppose you wouldn’t call it a Christening,” she mused to me). And my mother, by god, she defrosted a shepherd’s pie, blotted her lipstick, and floated down the sidewalk on a cloud of benign tolerance. “They were so welcoming!” she enthused to me afterwards, dumping all the delicious-looking food they had sent her home with into the garbage.

These memories got me sniffling.

“Ah, shit,” said Trevor, observing this.

“Karie don’t cry no more, don’t cry no more, Karie.” Which was what Kelli always said to me when I cried, because she was the older sister.

“Oh, it’s Karie, is it?” said Trevor.

“Sorry,” I said. We’d been speaking a half hour and I still hadn’t identified myself beyond “Kelli’s sister.” His identity had taken precedence. “It’s Karen.”