“Yes,” I said. “You do.”

“Those lines are so easily blurred.”

“It’s the intimacy,” I suggested.

“Yes!” said Margot. “That’s exactly right. The care we give is intimate. It’s very personal. And so people start to feel they have a personal relationship with their caregivers. You see? But it’s a professional relationship, Miz Petrie, with parameters. That’s what we need to keep in mind.”

“Am I being scolded?”

“Dear god!” exclaimed Margot. “Oh my dear god, no!”

I started to laugh. It was the extremity of Margot’s reaction — I’d felt like I’d insulted her earlier, but now it was as if I’d slapped her with a glove.

Margot waited for me to finish laughing.

“Now Miz Petrie —”

“Please call me Karen.”

“Yes, ok. Now Karen? Do you have any concerns or questions for me at this time?”

Was I going to be the one to say the word Trevor, or would Margot? Did she want me to or not?

“I think you’re saying,” I began, “the workers shouldn’t overstep, no matter how much we might rely on them. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“And I guess,” I continued, “that we shouldn’t encourage them to overstep.”

“By asking them to clean out your gutters or whathaveyou.”

I decided to try something.

“Or say, you know . . . say we want to give one of the workers a key to the house so it’ll be easier for them to —”

“Good god!” Margot exclaimed again. “By no means should a worker ever be given a key to the house! Nor should he ever accept it. Or she. That would be a fire-able offence right there.”

“I see.”

Margot sounded shaken. “I hope that’s a hypothetical.”

“Yes,” I said, “that’s a hypothetical. Can I ask another question?”

“Of course,” said Margot, recovered and back to sounding impatient.

“Did my mother ever have any issues with any of the workers? Did she ever report any problems, or ask for someone to be taken out of rotation or anything like that?”

“Oh, Miz Petrie,” said Margot, relaxing at the mention of my mother and forgetting to use my first name. “Your dear mother, god love her. Your mother never gave us any trouble at all. Your mother was just a dream.”

Of course. Of course my mother was.

I decided, in that moment, that it was time to get this phase of things over with. For Kelli and I to move forward with our lives.

Really I’d been imagining this all along, from the moment I decided to stay — the moving forward, that is. Once we sold the house, I imagined, once Kelli was enrolled in the Gorsebrook day program, we’d both be free — or free-ish. We’d rid ourselves of this place and its stifling routines — the tedium of Kelli and I stuck together, eating every meal beneath the fluorescent kitchen glare day in and day out. Not just the house but this whole winding rabbit warren of suburbs my mother had inexplicably chosen to settle into after my father died, for no reason other than, as she said, it was “close to a hospital,” which struck me as not a very optimistic motivation but maybe understandable following her husband’s untimely death at the breakfast table from cardiac arrest (an arrest so sudden, so absolute, the paramedics said he had likely died in the millisecond between putting his coffee down with a startled look and slumping face-first onto the linoleum). So Kelli and I spent the second part of our childhoods, the post-father part, in this neighbourhood, if it could be called that, a neighbourhood surrounded by glittering traffic and glassy car dealerships and squatting strip malls.