“Oh,” said Irene. She read the saying on the pillow again. “Well, this is a nice idea too, isn’t it? Let’s get this one.”

“No,” I said. “Because you don’t believe that. You don’t believe it’s about the journey.”

Any other parent at that point would probably have told me to go wait in the goddamn car, but Irene understood exactly what I was getting at, that this was an assault on her worldview that could by no means go unchallenged. She clutched the cushion in both hands and her cheeks blazed.

“Every moment of every day,” she said, “cannot simply be about you. Who are you if you’re not doing good? Who are you if you’re not doing what’s right? What is the good of the journey if you’re alone?”

“But you’re alone at the end of the journey anyway,” I argued. I was being very much a teenage girl now and crying, standing there over the cushion bin.

“You are not alone at the end of the journey,” said my mother, sounding appalled, a good-day-to-you-sir creeping into her tone.

“You don’t know that,” I said.

“I do know that,” said Irene. “Faith is knowing that. Faith is giving of yourself. Faith is doing so and expecting no reward.”

“Great — so now there’s no reward!” I yelled. “There’s nothing!”

“Faith is its own reward!” Irene yelled back.

We went home empty-handed. And after a couple of days, Irene reflected out loud that Kelli seemed perfectly comfortable on her stool. Perhaps she didn’t need a cushion after all.

I was ashamed by how blithely I’d decided to move home and assume my sister’s care — how blithe I’d been about it ever since. Just because it had been going well, just because I’d been so lucky these past couple weeks, I’d assumed I was nailing it. What a fool I felt now, remembering the smug way I’d grinned up at the fluorescent kitchen light, where I for some dumb reason imagined my mother’s ghost resided, declaring: Mom! It doesn’t have to be one or the other!

I’d thought that life with Kelli could be balanced, mitigated. That Irene had just been doing it wrong all these years. I’d thought we could hang out like normal sisters, run errands, go for lattes with Jessica Hendy, and every now and then I could just go off and have a little temper tantrum if Kelli got on my nerves — leave her in the car, assume she’d be fine. I’d assumed I could indulge myself if need be, that there could be some kind of fulfillment beyond my sister’s care — that I didn’t have to give myself over to it completely. But here’s what I needed to understand — what Irene understood. Either you were all in with Kelli, or you were not. But if you were, Kelli had to become your joy. Kelli would be where you went for meaning. Kelli was what it was all about. And Irene was right about this too — it was like faith. It was exactly like faith in that you had to stop futzing around and let it take you over. No more hemming and hawing. No more trying to have it both ways. And once you put your petty shit aside — your petty ego and your petty needs and your petty ambitions — that was when at last the world would open up. The world that was Kelli. It was a small world, a circumscribed world, but it was your world and you did what you could to make it beautiful. You focused on hygiene, nourishing meals, a pleasing home that always smelled good. That was your achievement and more importantly, that was you. Once you accepted that, you were — and this was strange to think but the moment I thought it I realized I had put my finger on the savagely beating heart of my mother’s philosophy — free.