In fact, the morning of the laundry dream, I couldn’t help myself — I climbed out of bed and went down to the laundry room. I flicked on the overhead light — the stark, sudden glare of it in contrast to the soft morning light coming in from the window made me flinch. The overhead — another long, fluorescent rectangle, like the one in Irene’s kitchen — gave out a steady humming noise, a sound that made my eyes water whenever I noticed it upstairs, but which I found sort of companionable and soothing down here. Maybe it was the mundanity of it — a humming overhead light precisely as you’d find in all of the most boring places in the world. Waiting rooms. School hallways. Queues at government offices. Nothing strange or uncanny could take place in a room lit like this. It was neat, certainly, and well organized in accordance with Irene’s usual standards, but except for some eyelet curtains she’d installed on the lone window, it was the one room in the house she hadn’t bothered to make cozy.

I took a step toward the window and saw something I hadn’t noticed before. It had a small shelf installed below it, a shelf that had always held, as far as I could remember, scrub brushes and special laundry products like Shout for getting out tough stains. But the shelf didn’t have that stuff anymore. Instead, it held a small array of framed family photographs.

I’d seen these pictures before. They were snapshots Irene had taken and stuck into miniature frames at various points over the years. The house was full of such pictures. For as long as I could remember, Irene’s end tables and shelves had always been littered with these small, framed, concentrated hits of memory. But I’d never seen them in the laundry room before. I picked each of them up in turn to get a good look. Grandma Gillis holding me as a baby while toddler Kelli looked on from our mother’s lap. Then one of me at sixteen, dressed for a formal dance and looking sort of inappropriately sexy. I was wearing a low-cut dress that I bought for myself at the mall as a kind of punishment of my mother because she had been too busy to shop for it with me. I remembered being surprised by the resigned way she had accepted this punishment at the time — she sighed, dutifully took my picture, gave me a shawl to “keep warm,” and that had been the extent of it. But what I could not remember her ever doing was framing this photo and leaving it out on display. The last time I saw it, it had been tucked safely away in a photo album chronicling my teen years.

Then there was a photo of Irene alone that I had seen many times before — she used to keep it by her bed — Irene in her forties, around the age I was now, standing up in front of her choir at midnight Mass, hair curled, earrings twinkling, warbling the solo. She was backgrounded by a wall of lit candles and her mouth was wide with song. Her eyes sparkled heavenward and it was a beautiful, triumphant portrait — one of those photographs that were so rare in the days before digital, where, as if by magic, you were captured precisely as you’d always hoped to see yourself.