“Wait and see what?”

“What happens to Jeremy. How Gorsebrook handles it. Just give them a chance.”

“Ok,” I said after a moment. “I’ll wait and see.” I said it, but I wasn’t convinced I meant it. I said it because Jessica wanted to hear it, and I felt like I was done speaking to Jessica for the time being. She wasn’t giving me, somehow, what I wanted from the phone call. I had wanted reassurance, and I suppose she thought that she was giving it to me, but the more she tried to calm me down about Gorsebrook, the more my gut roiled against her efforts. I thought of the pots tumbling out of the cupboard onto my head, the coats yanked off their hangers in an act of what felt like frustration. Someone was becoming increasingly fed up with me, and I couldn’t blame that someone. The message was: Stop kidding yourself and do what you know is right.

Jessica was talking about real estate now — she’d sensed I wanted to bring the call to a close and had switched over to business.

“I’ll be bringing around some people tomorrow afternoon, about three,” she was saying. “Will that work for you guys?”

I looked around. The house was clean — impeccably so, worthy of Irene Petrie in her prime.

“Yes,” I said. “Is there anything I should do before they come? Maybe some fresh flowers.”

“That’d be nice,” said Jessica. “And you could bake some cookies if you have time. Smell is really evocative for buyers and cookies smell like home.”

“Ok,” I said quickly, hoping to segue into a seamless goodbye.

But I knew what was coming. Jessica had to get her question in — the question she’d asked me practically every day since the yard sale. Whenever we spoke on the phone, she used it almost as a means of signing off, the way someone else might say, “’Kay, love you.”

“Get the key back from that guy yet?”

“Um,” I said. “I’m going to. I will.”

This threw Jessica off. She’d been poised to scold me briefly, as she always did, in response to my routine of scoffing, assuring her the key was no big deal and Kelli and I would be out of the house soon enough that it didn’t ultimately matter either way.

“Really?” said Jessica after a moment.

“Yeah,” I said. Then — “I called him, actually.”

“You did?”

“I did,” I said. “I’m seeing him later today.”

Jessica puffed a breath of astonishment into the receiver. “Good for you, Karen. Wow. You’re taking action!”

“Yes,” I agreed. “I’m taking action.”

It was a white lie. The truth was, I’d been intending to call earlier, but got distracted in all my Marlene-panic. Jessica’s inquiry about the key, however, reminded me of my game plan concerning Trevor. It was time to get it under way.

I’d let a few days go by since the Revelation of the Barbecue Sauce, as I’d come to think of it. And I did consider letting those days flicker past indefinitely, one by one, until Kelli and I were out of this house, on to different things, and Trevor was well and truly out of our lives. But I knew I wouldn’t do that. I’d already given away so much of Irene. The yard sale had picked the house almost clean of her — subtracting the lamps, the jewellery, the heavy stacks of hardbound-only books (because Irene always thought paperbacks looked “junky” on her shelves). We still had the house itself, Kelli and I, but soon that would be gone too. And it wasn’t that I wasn’t willing to give all this up — clearly I knew it needed to be done, and was doing it — it was just that Kelli and I had had these things already, these pieces of Irene. We’d soaked them up. We could rest assured we hadn’t overlooked, or missed out on, any of them. But what we’d never had — or I hadn’t at least — was a proper introduction to our mother’s son.