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said, with three other girls, because I paid ten bucks extra a month. In the middle of the night someone would flip on the light switch and the whole floor was moving, like a wave. It was cockroaches. There were other kids who had to sleep on the floor with them. For ten bucks less.
    I can’t imagine my mother living like this. Once a June bug got into the house and she had to lay a sheet of paper over top of it before she could step down, so that she didn’t have to watch her own foot coming down on the thing. It succumbed to a loud and crunchy death and my mother stood there, wringing her hands. She walked away, leaving the paper stuck to the floor.

    W hen Lianne died I think we all went into shock in our own way, and my dad’s way was to stop touching me or holding my hand when we walked down the street, something he would have always done before. Or, at least, that’s the before that I remember. Something about having to explain that grown men do this stuff to little girls, or having to think about it every day, or watching me comb the papers and get more and more informed. Something about that must have upset him, or made him afraid he’d upset me. I still wanted to sit on his lap, but I didn’t want to. Part of that was just me getting older. That divided feeling you get at that age, what other people think of as normal growing up. It’s easy to pathologize it.
    My mother seized up, too, but in a different way. She needed a lot more things after Lianne happened. Her hand was always on my shoulder. Whether this was new anxiety, or tied to her own childhood, or just because I was an only child, felt unclear.
    In the last few years she seems more herself again. More likethe peanut-butter-and-sprouts version than the wanders-out-of-an-alley version. She’s got a vegetable garden and it’s a thing she spends time on. When I was small we always had chives and snap peas at least. I’d hide out in the garden, crouching down and eating them off the vine before breakfast, then come into the house with pea-green fingers, my breath smelling mysteriously of onions.
    Who can eat chives before breakfast? my mother said.
    Fat cabbages, but their hearts split and filled up with jellied moth larvae. We never ate one. I notice in the new garden she hasn’t bothered with these, leaning to black-eyed Susans and daylilies, pretty things that grow regardless, whether or not anyone is watching them. She grew those cabbages for years.

    M y mother and I left the flea market and walked along Front Street in the sunshine. I had the new trench coat draped over my arm and I folded it over and wrapped the sweater around it. To keep things from getting wrinkled, I guess, although I only had the grocery bag to carry it all in anyway. My mother had her bike helmet clipped to the side of her purse and it smacked against her hip every time she took a long step forward.
    You want a Jewish brunch? she said. Sometimes after the flea we break up the long uphill ride by market hopping. St. Lawrence to Kensington, which is pretty close to where I live now, anyway. We’ll go into the Free Times for blintzes if it strikes us.
    I shook my head.
    Cold lemonade? she said. Free samples at Global Cheese?
    My mother strapped the helmet around her chin.
    Put yours on, she said. My own helmet was locked against my bike and I reached down and unhooked the U-lock and slid it carefully into a slot on the back rack. We coasted west on Wellington before climbing the hill at Spadina. I had the bag of clothes in my front basket and it bounced up and threatened to make a break for it every time I hit a crack in the pavement. My purse hung acrossmy body and by the time we got to the top I had a thick band of sweat under the strap, from my shoulder to my hip. February thaw.
    She locked up but I just stood there with my legs straddling the bike.
    Which street did you live on, again? I said. On Brunswick, right? When you met Dad.
    Brunswick, she said. She pointed across