After that she was in my house three times a week.

She had strong opinions.

She thought I let the children get away with murder.

She thought my coffee was weak.

She rearranged my spice shelf twice a year, in an order that made sense only to her, and I put it back, and she rearranged it again, and neither of us ever said a word about it in ten years.

She called me Jessi the way my own mother didn’t, which is to say constantly, in the middle of sentences, as punctuation. Jessi, hand me that.