These outings didn’t always go a hundred percent smoothly — I’m thinking in particular of the moment in the grocery store when the button on Kelli’s pants went flying after she bent over to pick up an avocado I’d unknowingly nudged out of the bin. As she straightened, the pants slid to her ankles and, me being distracted by the grocery list, Kelli determined that the best thing to do was step out of them and continue on her way. I was learning to take this sort of thing in stride. People staring was not the end of the world. Teenagers pulling out their phones and managers approaching to ask if they could “help” were easily dispatched, especially once I learned to apply my mother’s ice-queen imperiousness — a persona she reserved especially for this kind of incident. As a kid, I called it my mother’s “good-day-to-you-sir” because everything she uttered in that tone sounded like it should be followed up by those five words. Now I found myself rocking a frosty good-day-to-you-sir all my own (“Put the phone away right now, young man. I’m not going to tell you again”). I had rolled my eyes whenever she affected it back when I was growing up — I’d found it so theatrical and needlessly bitchy. But now I saw it was a secret weapon.

It was all this running around that probably kept Kelli from noticing she was no longer being taken for her walks two days a week. Or if she did notice, she didn’t complain about it to me. Kelli was wonderfully low maintenance during this period — except for her bouts of wakefulness, which lately had developed a new wrinkle. Every so often, I realized, after a couple of restful, undisturbed nights, Kelli would get up without waking me. Which sounds like it should have been great, but those were the occasions it turned out I had to watch out for. Because Kelli seemed to be moving stuff. One morning I got up and the kitchen chairs were all over the place — one in the doorway of the kitchen, one turned facing away from the table, another in the living room. Another time I got up and found the blue recycling bin my mother always kept in a corner of the kitchen on its side at the top of the stairs.

“You can’t put stuff there, Kell,” I told her. “One of us could trip.”

“Trip fall down,” acknowledged Kelli.

“That’s right,” I said. “Don’t move stuff around when you get up, ok? It’s just going to make you more awake.”

“Don’t move stuff, no,” Kelli agreed. But it kept happening. One afternoon I opened the hallway closet and found everything on the floor. All the coats and jackets had been pulled off their hangers.

The strangest thing about all this was that it seemed so uncharacteristically energetic of Kelli. In her waking hours, Kelli never even roused herself to so much as open the closet door, let alone rifle through the coats or rearrange furniture. Could it be, I wondered, that she was sleepwalking? And, in sleepwalking, was she a completely different kind of Kelli?