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yelling to Trevor, “You put the channel back when I get back!” and Trevor saying yes, yes.
    She put the box on the shelf anyway. Another time, when she knew how long she’d have. She fluffed the clothes to make them look ordinary, fitted the chair back into its dents in the carpet by the window, and scuffed her sock feet over the drag-lines made by the chair. Trevor was shrieking in the living room. Gran yelled at him to shut up, and then Pearce was crying. She could do the bathroom any time—but there was still the kitchen.
     
    The nurse must have just been in. Lorraine sat propped up, flipping channels, the sheets tucked tight around her. She looked sick, and Clara said so.
    “It’s the fever,” Lorraine said. “They can’t get it to stay down. Is Trevor okay?”
    “He’s happy outside. He likes the old birch tree that my father planted when I was born.”
    “A tree planted when you were born? How big is it?”
    “It’s not that big, I’m only forty-three.”
    “I didn’t mean that,” Lorraine said, coming close to a laugh. It seemed to hurt her chest. “How about Darlene?”
    “She can tell me what they’re used to, now—” Now that Clayton was gone. Clara steered away from that. “She’s very good with Pearce, too. If he cries she can calm him better than any of us.”
    “He crying a lot?”
    “Oh no, I didn’t mean—Just when once in a while he makes a murmur.”
    “Because he’s a good baby, he doesn’t cry.”
    “He’s a perfect baby. You must be missing him.”
    Lorraine began to sob. Clara sat watching, in an agony of guilt. After a moment, though, Lorraine stopped. As if crying took more energy than she was prepared to expend. “Spilt milk,” she said. “They took that other lady out—the ovarian one. She went in for surgery, but when they opened her up they couldn’t do anything. They sewed her back up and sent her home to Wilkie.”
    Difficult to respond to that.
    “That’s the bad part,” Lorraine said. She patted the bed restlessly, and fumbled with the small flowered pillow that Clara had remembered to bring in for her.
    “Can I fix it?” Clara slid her arm under Lorraine’s neck, lifting her head gently. In one quick motion Clara slipped the flowered pillow out, shook it into softness again, and smoothed it into a double fold to fit nicely beneath Lorraine’s ear.
    “You’re good at that.”
    “I had practice with pillows, looking after my mother for many years while she was ill.”
    They sat together in silence for a while but Lorraine was still restless. “We were on our way to Fort McMurray. Clayton’s got a job lined up there. His cousin has an RV dealership, used, and now that so many people can’t find any place to live up there, there’s lots of people buying. Clayton was going to help Kenny fix up trailers, there was one on the lot that we could use while we figured out where to live. It would have been okay for a while, until we found something better.”
    “Lots of work up in Fort McMurray, they say.”
    “He can do a lot of things you wouldn’t expect,” Lorraine said. “He’s a good cabinet-maker. He upholsters furniture, too, and that’s hard work. That’s what his cousin wanted him for, to reupholster the trailer fittings. He’d surprise you, how good he is.”
    Maybe he’d gone on without them, Clara thought.
    Lorraine stopped talking, and twisted her head from side to side. “My neck hurts.”
    “Do you want me to see if they can give you something?”
    “I don’t want to take anything. I’m already taking stuff. I don’t know.”
    Clara thought the fever was increasing.
    “It’s hard,” Lorraine said.
    “Yes,” Clara said. Not knowing what else to say.
     
    On the very top shelf of the last kitchen cupboard Darlene found a brown envelope taped down on a glass pedestal thing. Tons of money in it. It added up to seven hundred and something, counting pretty quick, one ear open for Clara coming back from the store. But it