Mumma had lived through lean times: nothing potentially useful was ever discarded. Old clothes, old shoes, old handbags. Empty bottles of all descriptions, washed and stored in a closet. Bits of string— short lengths tied end to end, wound like yarn into balls. There were oak-slat baskets in every corner, filled with quilt pieces and rag rugs in progress; cigar boxes held skeins of ribbons, hoarded buttons, and wooden spools of thread. She kept the empty spools, as well. Just in case.

As her only heir, I would benefit from Mumma’s parsimony, and from the carefully conserved proceeds from the sale of the sewing machine business, but I simply could not think in those terms, not yet. Overwhelmed, I often wandered from room to room, helpless in the face of it all, alone but surrounded by the dead, for every flat surface was peopled with framed studio portraits. Ernest and Lillian as children. Lillian and Douglas at their wedding. A series of the two boys, almost growing up. A stranger might have thought Mumma had only two children, but pictures of me were nearly always disappointing, you see. Why pay a photographer for something that wouldn’t bear looking at? I understood this, even as a child, though I won’t deny a lingering sense of invisibility.

I found other evidence of my existence, however: my grammar school report cards, tied with blue yarn, were tucked away in a desk drawer. These, Mumma had evidently decided, were suitable keepsakes of her eldest child’s youth. And then there were the ghosts of birthdays past that she had stashed away. Dusty candy boxes filled with fossilized chocolates. Books of poetry, their spines uncracked. Heaps of unused embroidered handkerchiefs. I sometimes broke down in tears when I came across a Christmas present that I had carefully selected for her, and that she had left untouched for years at the back of a cupboard or on the top shelf of a bookcase. It’s the thought that counts, of course, but it was disheartening to find evidence of how consistently I had failed to please her.