Jessica was silent for a moment. “Don’t say that.” She sounded distant, like she was holding the phone away from her face. She understood what I meant. She’d heard me complain about Trevor, in particular the benign way he had of bullying Kelli and me, enough to understand. I could hear how the very idea of having something in common with Trevor had cooled Jessica several degrees, made her want to end the conversation. We exchanged a chilly goodbye. I felt bad, briefly, but then I emptied out the second crisper, filled it with sudsy water, and resumed my work.

19

After I finished with the crispers, I decided to go back to sorting through the little village of condiments I had left on the floor in front of the fridge. Some them were downright ancient, I saw at once, and had to be tossed. The Worcester sauce, for example, I was certain had been there since my teen years. The tomato relish was fizzing with biological activity, turning itself into alcohol. But then there were the condiments I wasn’t sure of, that felt somehow eternal, like the French’s mustard. How did you know if mustard went bad? It was already a sickly yellow.

After a while, I developed a nice rhythm of tossing and keeping condiments, making instantaneous decisions about their fates the moment I weighed them in my hands. Toss, keep. Toss, keep. But I stopped when I got to the barbecue sauce.

I knew it was still perfectly good because we’d eaten it with Trevor just the other day. But I couldn’t bring myself to put it back in the fridge. There was something wrong with it that I couldn’t put my finger on. Its bland yellow label stared back at me. No Name Barbecue Sauce. The bottle was about a third full.

After a moment I reached into the fridge and placed it on the shelf with my mother’s other condiments, along with the few I’d bought myself since I’d been here. I looked at them, gathered together, and then I removed the ones I’d bought — the fish sauce for stir-frys and balsamic vinegar for salads — and placed them back on the floor. I wanted to see only my mother’s condiments, congregated there on the shelf.

And then it made sense. There was the Grey Poupon and the sauerkraut in red wine sauce and a variety of artisanal jams, jellies, and pickled veg with handwritten labels bought from craft markets or the like. Some of these jars were tiny, and still had decorative ribbons tied around them.

And this was the problem: the No Name barbecue sauce loomed over my mother’s dainty jars and bottles like a giant yellow gorilla had lumbered into a village of unassuming pygmies.

NO NAME BARBECUE SAUCE, it bellowed.

Apple-Ginger Preserve, peeped one of the tiny, beribboned jars in a decorative, feminine script. Madeline’s Bread and Butter Pickles.

NO NAME BARBECUE SAUCE.

Bumbleberry Compote. Sweet Baby Dills.

I picked the sauce up again. As I’ve said, the massive bottle was about a third full.