Earlier, I’d been upstairs, on the balcony, gazing at the barbecue. I’d pulled off the cover — it was a new cover, why hadn’t I seen this before? Not discoloured from decades of sitting out in winter, but a vibrant, shiny blue, still with creases and the smell of plastic on it, freshly bought, maybe only a season old.

And the barbecue itself? How could I have ever thought it was the same as the one that had belched flames into the face of my drunken boyfriend on the occasion of my eighteenth birthday? This one was obviously not almost thirty years old. The chrome still shone. The grill had not even been adequately blackened from the repeated, fiery intermingling of animal fat and caramelizing sugar courtesy of the liberal application of No Name barbecue sauce.

She had bought it for him. All of it. The barbecue. The TV set. The cable package.

In gratitude for all he’d done.

Kelli lingered in the doorway, watching me.

“Karie don’t cry,” she said after a moment. “Not cryin.”

“Sorry, Kell.”

“No,” said Kelli, going back upstairs.

That, I thought, was our family in a nutshell.

20

It was late summer and the heat became tropical, without even a breeze off the Atlantic to offer relief. Kelli and I had to be ready to bolt at the drop of a hat now that the house was on the market, but it was by no means drop-of-a-hat kind of weather, nor had my sister ever been a drop-of-a-hat kind of girl. Kelli’s thing was to dawdle. She liked a few hours’ advance notice of any potential outing, to sit in her chair and think about the proposed destination, perhaps issue a few inquiries, before she would agree to heave herself to her feet and be helped on with her shoes. It wasn’t that Kelli didn’t like going out — in fact the magic words Tim Hortons could get her very excited at the prospect indeed — it was simply that Kelli would not be rushed. Especially not in this weather, and definitely not more than once a day. One outing was enough for Kelli — more than enough. But Jessica had people coming over twice, sometimes three times, in a single, sultry afternoon.

I did my best to develop a system that would expedite removal of Kelli from the house whenever I got the call from Jessica, a gone-in-sixty-seconds game plan. Gradually I had realized the best way to deal with Kelli was to work with and not against her idiosyncrasies. I bought her a new pair of comfy outdoor shoes that could double as slippers and made her wear them around the house and — voila — no interminable process of battling to get her shoes on at the last minute. I kept Kelli’s sunscreen in the car so she’d have no excuse to hem and haw and argue with me in the foyer, twisting this way and that as I tried to slather her face with it. But that — the shoe gambit and the sunscreen maneuver — was about all I could do other than paint gorgeous, evocative word-pictures of the delights that awaited her at Tim Hortons or, if we needed to mix it up a little, Starbucks. Still, Kelli kept to her own pace, and more than once we’d just be coming out of the house — usually hollering at each other — as Jessica pulled up with her latest fresh-faced carload of prospective buyers.