“Remember the funeral?” I said. “Remember when everyone came to the house? Uncle Danny and Francie and Leo and the Cape Breton cousins? That was for Mumma. To say goodbye.”

“Leo,” said Kelli, perking up, because she’d always had a thing for our young cousin Leo, who’d flown up from Boston.

“That’s right, Leo was there.”

“Beard,” said Kelli. Kelli wasn’t big on beards, and Leo had morphed into a textbook hipster at some point, sporting a gloriously oiled beast to go with his forearm tattoos and stiff, rolled-bottom jeans.

“You didn’t like Leo’s beard?”

“Don’t like that beard,” she confirmed.

“We’ll tell him to shave it off next time, eh?”

“Shave that beard,” said Kelli, imagining it. “Shave that beard, Leo.” She smiled, liking the sound of what she was saying, and repeated it rapidly a few times to herself, testing out its rhythms. Shaydatbeard, Leo, shaydatbeard. This kind of sing-song, staccato repetition of whatever collection of words happened to appeal to her at a given moment was a pastime of Kelli’s and it meant that she was feeling better. She tried whispering it awhile and even started rocking slightly. I said it a few times with her, which Kelli also seemed to like. I kept pace with her, following her distinctive Kelli-rhythm, whispering when she whispered, and soon the words meant nothing. That is, nothing but their original sense of play and teasing remained — the sounds just meant pleasure for Kelli now. They soothed her. They soothed us both. It was very much as if we were praying together. And I left her bedroom knowing what I had to do.

I had to stay.

10

It’s hard for me to admit this now, but the euphoria I experienced the moment I made this decision — the weird endorphin-releasing cascade of revelation and sense of having shaken off, little by little, a kind of psychic hair shirt, made me feel giddy, and I badly wanted to call someone with my amazing news. It genuinely did seem like amazing news, at the time — a downright epiphany. I can give up! I am giving up! So the first thing I did was go to the fridge and reach beneath the Dutch-shoes magnet for the card that read TREV.

But I didn’t call Trevor. I almost did, but something stopped me. I knew, of course, that Trevor would approve — his pep-talk over my uneaten chicken earlier that evening made it clear what he felt my course of action should be. To stay and care for my sister, naturally. And in a way it made sense he would be the one I called because, for better or for worse, Trevor was the one who knew, most intimately, of my dilemma these past few weeks. So it was tempting. Not only did I know Trevor would understand my decision, but he would laud it. He would congratulate me.

At the same time, though, I had to admit: I didn’t really know Trevor that well. And furthermore, the face-smack of endorphins had a clarifying effect on my brain — the fog that had settled into it from the moment I’d stepped back into this house to preside over the end of my mother’s life had finally lifted, or so it felt. And I knew at last that I would have to draw some boundaries.