By that point, the first police car was already pulling up, so Noel went outside to gawk along with the rest of the neighbours. The garage door had been rolled open, and that’s when Noel saw the message that had been scrawled across the wall of Arun Gill’s garage. In the O of the word home, Noel noted, the vandals had scrawled a happy face.

“Ignorant bastards,” Noel remarked at the end of this story, and horked onto the sidewalk as if for punctuation. He lamented his lost key for the fifth or so time since I’d been talking to him. A couple of shots in the air, he reflected mournfully, would’ve lit a fire under those bastards’ asses — but good.

It was only once I came back inside after the police cars pulled away and the excitement had died down that I found my phone. It was lying on the floor of the foyer, face down, where I could only suppose it had fallen from my pocket or purse or something. When I picked it up, I saw its face was cracked.

Kelli stayed in bed all morning the next day, but by dinnertime her appetite was back. It was as I’d predicted, a minor, inexplicable bout, just as her attack of diarrhea had been a few weeks before. Just another mystery in the overall mystery of Kelli.

To keep occupied while we waited for the house to sell, I decided to do as much of the cleaning as I could myself. It was a big house and a big job and I planned my days around which rooms I would tackle. I went to the store and bought scrub brushes and sponges and high-tech, environmentally unfriendly cleansers like Comet and Scrubbing Bubbles and Mr. Clean Magic Erasers, in defiance of my mother’s insisting, throughout my childhood and adolescence, that nothing worked like a little vinegar, lemon juice, and baking soda, thereby making every cleaning job about a hundred times more arduous than it needed to be.

I learned things about Irene as I cleaned, spending entire afternoons with Oceanview FM playing songs from every possible era as I knelt on the kitchen floor as if at prayer, half my body consumed by an emptied-out cupboard. For one thing, I learned that Irene was not the meticulous neat freak I’d always believed her to be. In the backs of those cupboards, I found casserole dishes stuck together with grease and dust, a cast-iron pan that had rusted into a crusty, red shadow of its former self, and ancient, stiffened rags that had been tossed in, for some reason, and forgotten about — almost as if my mother had been involved in this very task, that is, cleaning the cupboards, and decided in the middle of it: Fuck this.

Then I shoved aside the fridge and discovered the veritable UN of refrigerator magnets I had always imagined dwelled beneath it. There, blackened with grease, was tiny Mozart at his piano. There was the Thailand tuk-tuk, the Eiffel Tower, and more, all swimming in a dried, dust-fuzzed puddle of blackish-brown who-knows-what. After I’d heaved the fridge aside, I just stood there for a while, taking in this vile, decades-old stew of plastic doodads and hardened gunk — grappling with it. My mother never looked behind the fridge. Irene Petrie. Not once. Not in a very long time. There had been spills. Clearly, there had been spills over the years. A fumbled bottle of soy sauce. A jar of pickles slipping from wet fingers, pooling brine. And my mother, Irene Petrie, had mopped up what she saw, knowing full well a good portion of the liquid would have seeped beneath the fridge, for that’s what liquid does. It tends to seep.