Someone was poking me in the hip. I looked down, and it was Martin Hendy. He peered up at me through his blond lashes. “This man would like to buy the microwave,” he said.

Trevor turned to the man in question before I could, drawing him into our argument in all his frustration. “Maybe you’d like a big-screen TV to go with it, eh? Going cheap!”

Martin was standing with a man who lived across the street. Mr. . . . something. He had introduced himself to me at my mother’s wake, and either his first or his last name was, I recalled, Gill. I remembered when he and his family moved into this suburb, my mother had kept referring to them, in her tolerant, broad-minded voice, as “the new Mediterranean family.” But when I visited and got a glimpse of these neighbours, I realized she had meant Middle Eastern — she sometimes got the two confused. And Middle Eastern was her blanket term for any number of non-white ethnicities.

Before I could say anything, Martin had dashed off to make his next deal and Mr. Gill and Trevor had already clasped hands in quick, wary greeting, as if they knew they’d once been introduced, but could not remember when or where.

“Oh, hello,” Mr. Gill was saying.

“How’s it going,” said Trevor, looking around as if this were already a conversation he wanted out of.

“I haven’t seen you about,” said Mr. Gill.

“Nope,” said Trevor. “And I’m just on my way now, so it happens.”

“Trevor, no,” I said. “You are taking the TV.”

He held up his hands again, this time in surrender instead of resistance. “All right, all right,” he said. “Jesus. Let me just go back the truck in. Mike!” he bawled at Mike, who had been trying on a pair of my mother’s clip-on earrings and whipped his head around at the sound of his father’s voice.

“Stay put,” Trevor hollered, striding down the driveway. “I’m just getting the truck.”

Mr. Gill and I watched him go, both of us a little stunned by the noise and abruptness of this departure, and me in particular by how suddenly Trevor had given way about the television.

After a moment, Mr. Gill and I shook hands.

“I was your mother’s neighbour,” said Mr. Gill. “Arun.”

“Yes, hi,” I said. “I remember.”

“I was very sorry to hear about her passing.”

“Thank you,” I said.

He was a slight, balding man with long lashes fringing a pair of liquid eyes — expressive to the point of being cartoonish. “She had a difficult time of it.”

“She did,” I said, nodding rapidly. “It wasn’t easy.” I wanted to get this part of the conversation over with, because gazing into the warm, commiserating eyes of Arun Gill while sharing memories of my mother as the surrounding neighbours carried pieces of her away was a recipe for precisely the kind of emotional breakdown I’d been congratulating myself for having avoided this entire day. It was time to talk microwave.