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.

  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.

  “I haven’t left the house in a couple of days,” I told her. “My imagination might be working overtime.”

  The dishwasher, which had been running this whole time, switched cycles at that moment and emitted a grinding sort of whine. It was an old Sunbeam, and had been doing this off and on for the past couple of weeks. I’d been ignoring it, hoping it was one of those minor mechanical issues that would work itself out. I knew I should probably replace it for the incoming homeowners, but I also knew I probably wouldn’t, as long as the dishes kept turning out ok.

  “Anyway,” I said, moving away from the grinding dishwasher. “I’ve started the cleaning.”

  “Oh, Karen,” said Jessica, accepting the change of subject. “You should hire someone to do that. With everything else you have going on right now.”

  “No, it’s good. I mean, I will if it gets too much. But right now, it’s therapeutic.”

  “You didn’t tell me how Kelli was,” said Jessica after a moment.

  “Yes I did.”

  “You said she’s great.”

  “She is! She’s in her spot by the window, rocking up a happy storm as we speak. Jessica says hi, Kelli!” I called into the living room.

  “Jenny Mad-tall,” came the reply. “Heh-heh-heh.”

  “Kelli says hi back,” I told her.

  “But how’d she do after all the vomiting? Did you ever figure out what caused it?”

  “No. It had to have been food poisoning. Kelli was just more sensitive to something or another — something in the coleslaw maybe — than we were.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Jessica.

  “The mystery that is Kelli!” I said, picking dried vegetable matter out of the corners of the crisper.

  “Maybe you should take her to the doctor,” said Jessica.

  I stopped scrubbing for a moment. “Yeah,” I said. “Of course. I mean, she seems fine. But definitely, once things have settled down —”

  “You know, house hunting doesn’t need to be the priority right now —”

  “Oh, it’s very much the priority,” I told her. “You have no idea how desperate we are to get out of here.”

  “I do,” said Jessica. “I’m just saying, you sound a little frazzled.”

  I stopped scrubbing altogether. Was I frazzled? I didn’t think I felt frazzled, exactly. Busy, maybe. But mostly I felt focused, and motivated.

  “Did you get the key back from that guy yet?”

  Jessica now knew Trevor’s name but for some reason she never said it. It was always “that guy” or “the kidnapping guy.” It was as if she could ward him off that way — keep him at a distance.

  “Jessica!” I said. “I haven’t even seen him.”

  “He’s going to be back,” said Jessica. “Guys like that always come back.”

  “Guys like what?” I said.

  “Guys that can’t stand for you not to be thinking about them,” said Jessica.

  I was applying steel wool to the corner of the crisper and didn’t really think about the thing I said next. “You know, you’re actually reminding me a bit of him right now.”

  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.

  And it had been — I remembered this from the day Trevor hauled it out after our drive out to Barnbarroch Manor, after he’d pulled the cover off the barbecue and I’d been surprised to find it so pristine — it had been about half full on that day. Just a week and half after my mother’s death.

  We’d only used it twice since then, after all.

  I looked at the expiry date — almost a full year from now. So the massive bottle, now only a third full, had not been purchased forever-ago, like the Worcester sauce and the tomato relish had, left to languish indefinitely in the back of my mother’s fridge.

  It had been bought fairly recently. By a woman who at the time would have been inching her way toward death’s door. Bought, and very promptly eaten up.

  * * *

  Arun Gill stood in his still-defiled garage, just arrived home from work. The mess the vandals left had been hastily, partially cleaned up — tools and debris that they’d flung around had since been shoved into neatish piles, to be replaced on shelves and in cupboards later.

  The racist graffiti remained. I could see that there were other scrawls in addition to the PAKI GO HOME that Noel had told me about. There was a more formal, policy-minded DEPORT ALL MUSLIMS and, on the opposite wall, almost as an afterthought, F.U. ISIS SCUMBAGS.

  I’d been waiting for him, sitting at the window alongside Kelli and gazing at his house. From the street, the sight of the two of us framed in the window like that, side by side, staring vacantly, probably made it look as if she and I had finally synced up in some creepy, sisterly way like the twins in The Shining, become two halves of the same person. But when I saw Mr. Gill pull into his garage, I told Kelli to stay put and hurried across the street.

  It was only once I got there, once Mr. Gill got out of his car and saw me lingering in his driveway, that I noticed I was still holding the jumbo bottle of No Name barbecue sauce. I had, I realized, taken a seat at the window beside Kelli with it in my hands after I’d finished replacing all the other condiments in the fridge.

  I gestured with it by way of greeting. “Hi.”

  He invited me in but I explained Kelli was alone in the house and I felt I should stay where I could keep an eye on her in her window and she could keep an eye on me. We both turned and waved at her, and Kelli’s rocking become a little more pronounced. Kelli had been not exactly alarmed but certainly curious when I’d told her I was going across the street. Now she likely was getting a kick out of seeing me on the other side of the window, experiencing it as a performance put on for her benefit.

  “So,” I said, not sure where to begin. “Really sorry about the break-in yesterday.”

  “You didn’t see anything, did you?” asked Mr. Gill. “Did the police talk to you?”

  “No. I mean, they did, but I didn’t. Kelli heard something. She woke me up. She said she heard something breaking.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Gill. “It’s good to have alert neighbours, I can tell you that. Marilyn” — he inclined his head toward the house next door — “was on the phone to police before I was!”

  “It’s a great neighbourhood,” I said. “Good people.”

  “Very good,” said Mr. Gill. “You and Kelli will be missed. As your mother is missed.”

  It was kind of him to include me in that list, I thought, even though I had only really met most of the neighbours yesterday. Mr. Gill had an understated courtliness to him — everything he said seemed to extend a certain generosity, seemed to be inquiring what he could do to make you more comfortable.

  “Um,” I said, glancing down at the barbecue sauce in my hands. Mr. Gill watched me expectantly, probably assuming that any moment I’d explain why I had brought it with me. “Speaking of my mother,” I began. “You know that guy, yesterday? Trevor? The care worker? You thought he was my brother?”

  “I’m so sorry for that mistake,” said Mr. Gill.

  “No, no, no,” I said. “It’s no big deal. It’s just, I was wondering. What exactly gave you that impression?”

  Mr. Gill began to flutter his Bambi-like eyelashes again, abashed. “It was entirely my misapprehension,” he said. “I saw him mowing the lawn from time to time. Working on the house —”

  “Working on the house?” I repeated. Cleaning out the gutters?

  “Yes. And the car —”

  “The car?”

  “And spending time with your sister, of course. I often saw them out for walks on the weekends.”

  “On the weekends,” I repeated after a moment.

  “I suppose your mother relied on him quite a bit,” said Mr. Gill.

  I looked down at the barbecue sauce again. Mr. Gill did too.

  “May I ask —” he began delicately.

  “I think that’s right,” I said. “I think she did. Quite a bit. So you’re saying — based on all those things — you just assumed?”

  Mr. Gill blushed. He opened his mouth and began to stammer. “My dear Miss Petrie,” he began.

  “Karen,” I said.

  “Karen, I don’t wish to — I’m not sure . . . Well, it’s awkward, rather.”

  I watched him carefully. It was not, I realized, that he had just assumed.

  It was that he had been told.

  · · ·

  * * *

  So let’s say you are Irene Petrie and you are dying of cancer. Scratch that — you are not dying of cancer. You will be, but not yet. When you are, it will overtake you all of a sudden, in a very un-cancerlike fashion. More like a heart attack really, or a stroke. Pouncing on you not out of the blue, exactly, because it’s always been there — like a moody but up-till-now relatively docile cat. A cat who scratched and nipped every once in a while, but mostly slept. A cat who will later, out of nowhere, launch itself at you, spitting poison, spiky-furred and claws extended.

  That cancer — vicious, sudden, angry metastatic cancer of the liver — will lay you out, yes. And the doctor will call your semi-estranged daughter and tell her she must come now. You’ll see her briefly, exchange a few words, and that will be that. But before that, you, Irene Petrie are not dying of cancer. You are living with cancer. As you have for the past decade, give or take, since your mastectomy. And you have always done a bang-up job of it, if you do say so yourself.

  The fact is, however, you are now in your seventies and you’re not as spry as you used to be. This annoys you, because you are busy. There are doctor’s appointments to be kept — for both you and your disabled daughter, Kelli. Every appointment means bundling Kelli into the car, coaxing her into a given office building, performing a series of negotiations to get on the elevator, once going up and once (always the worst of the two trips now that she’s been reminded of her loathing for these contraptions) going down. Between the two of you — an old lady living with cancer, an intellectually disabled woman with chronic ear infections — there are a lot of doctor’s appointments.

 

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