“Then why did he take it?” said Jessica.

Ew! yelped Martin, above our heads. Ew, agh! Mom!

We’d enjoyed, earlier that afternoon, a summery, childlike lunch of hot dogs, coleslaw and a potato salad that Jessica brought, and now it had all been chewed up, semi-digested, and regurgitated onto Kelli’s lap, not to mention my mother’s spill-something-on-me-I-dare-you carpet. We had almost made it, Kelli and I. We had almost got free of this place without defiling my mother’s domestic temple, without violating her impeccable standards of cleanliness and care-taking. Oh well, I thought. We were selling the place anyway. Soon we would leave it all behind, all these violations, all the infractions and trespasses I’d accumulated over the years. All my big and little incidents of falling short.

“Kelli puked,” said Kelli, with a weary air similar to what I was feeling.

Jessica was already in the kitchen, yanking opening cupboards in search of a bucket, and Martin had followed her in order to be in a different room. “Thank god,” she called, “she didn’t have the Kool-Aid!”

“But the ketchup,” I said glumly, standing and staring at the defiled carpet.

“It’ll be all right,” said Jessica, rushing back into the room and throwing an armful of paper towel on top of the not-quite-liquid puddle between Kelli’s feet.

Kelli burped. It came from somewhere very deep within her, and her face was as if someone invisible had just spoken in her ear.

“Bucket,” whispered Jessica, just as Kelli leaned over and let ’er rip. She didn’t intend to get any on her lap this time.

I created a little sanctuary around the downstairs bathroom toilet for Kelli, laying a quilt across the cold tile and grabbing some pillows from the spare bedroom for her to kneel on as she retched. Jessica suggested lighting a scented candle and placing it on the sink to help dispel the vomit smell and generally give my sister comfort. Jessica said lavender would be ideal. Did I happen to have a lavender candle lying around?

I almost laughed at this. Whose house did she think she was in? There was an entire unopened package of votives in the cupboard above the fridge that I’d specifically kept out of the yard sale and put aside for whenever Kelli and I were in need of a whiff of mother-memory.

The retching was violent and continuous for the first hour, and after Jessica had called her husband to say she would be late and handed Martin her phone to play with, we conferred. Kelli kept heaving long after there was nothing left to bring up and it pained me to see her shuddering through these futile contractions. She and I had the same shellfish allergy and it had always manifested in precisely this way — heaving emptily, over and over again, well into the wee hours of the morning — so I knew what she was going through. Her stomach was seizing up, so violently it required nearly every other muscle in her body to contract along with it, flinging bile upwards into her esophagus, forcing everything out. In the morning, she would feel like she’d spent a whole day at the gym, doing abdominal crunches from every possible angle.