And what did my mother do?

She left it there.

For decades.

I knelt before it, and scrubbed.

· · ·

Jessica called when I was cleaning out the fridge. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by condiments, feeling like Gulliver among the Lilliputians or an eccentric child holding court with her toys, if her toys were Worcester sauce and French’s mustard and a jar of homemade tomato relish and a jumbo bottle of No Name barbecue sauce. These were my assembled friends. This was my community.

“Hey,” said Jessica. “Just checking in. How’s Kelli?”

Kelli’s puking fit seemed like ages ago to me but, I realized, it had only been a couple days. But they were days that had been consumed by cleaning. It felt like I’d spent the past forty-eight hours in a kind of trance, a communion with the house and with my mother’s memory. Or maybe something more than her memory. For the most part, the experience had been meditative, but now and then the housework took an unexpected turn of the sort that made me feel almost under attack. For example, I opened a high cupboard I had forgotten to clean before the yard sale, which had held, for as long as I could remember, Irene’s recipe books. But the cupboard turned out to be crammed haphazardly full of pots. They tumbled out as if they’d been lying in wait the moment I opened the cupboard door. I’d covered my head with my arms, and now my arms were bruised.

“Kelli’s great,” I told Jessica. Then I remembered she didn’t know about the vandalism of Arun Gill’s garage the night of the yard sale, so I told her about that — and how Kelli had woken me up complaining about noise.

“God,” said Jessica. “What a night you had!”

I reached into the fridge and yanked out one of the crisper drawers, carrying it over to the counter to empty it out. I wanted badly to keep cleaning.

“Yeah, it’s been pretty eventful lately,” I agreed. “Talking to the cops twice in the same week. First the crazy guy in the parking lot, now apparently the KKK’s at large in our neighbourhood.”

“You doing ok?”

“Also there’s a ghost,” I added, laughing. This was the first time I’d said it out loud — that I had acknowledged the thought to myself at all.

“A ghost?” repeated Jessica.

“Yeah. I’m thinking we have a ghost, moving the furniture around at night, putting stuff in weird places. Your basic poltergeist MO.” I laughed again, to reassure Jessica I wasn’t really serious. “I mean — it’s Kelli. She’s been getting up at night a lot lately.”

“Oh,” said Jessica.

“It’s just — moving stuff around has never really been her thing. So it’s weird.”

“Ok, but you know it’s not a ghost,” said Jessica. Jessica was the kind of person, I had noticed in our reacquaintance, who never quite got a joke. Or, that wasn’t it exactly. It was more like she never quite accepted jokes, or flip remarks, for what they were. Whenever I made a flip remark, instead of laughing, she always just peered closely at me. It could be discomfiting. That’s what it felt like she was doing now, on the phone. I had given her an out, a “just kidding” about the ghost, so we could laugh. But she wasn’t laughing. She was peering.