I don’t know how much the company in Kansas earned each year, because we never heard from Kansas except when Christmas cards filled with warm Midwest greetings arrived for each full-time staff member.

Keeping the books for an organization that housed fifty-seven residents and a dozen staff was easier than it may sound. Monthly fees for almost all of the residents were paid from private and government pension plans. My job was to confirm receipts, issue salary payments, and pay utilities and repairs. Everything was routine. Surprises were rare and small. I finished my work in five hours, from one to six, two days a week.

I took half my pay in cash. The other half I gave back to ensure that Mother would enjoy the privilege of her private room, something her pension income alone wouldn’t cover. When I arrived for work, she would be about to have lunch. When I left for home, she would have finished her dinner and said goodbye.

Trafalgar Towers is north of the canal, just beyond the marsh where herons stand in water and poke for fish. It is an easy walk to the retirement home from our house. I can make it there in less than half an hour. When the weather is pleasant, I follow the path to the canal, cross the lift bridge over the canal, skirt the marshland, and there I am. I did this on the day Gabe died.

In summer, the lift bridge rises every half-hour, permitting sailboats to leave the bay and enter the deeper, cleaner, more dangerous waters of the lake, or return to the bay and sail past the steel mills on their way to the yacht clubs and marinas west of the factories. The bridge also rises for cargo ships, which signal their approach from either direction with a blast of their horns, but there are few cargo ships now.

In summers when I was a teenager, and if my boyfriend had a car, I would ask him to drive me to the canal that cuts through the beach strip, joining the Great Lake to the bay. We would watch ships enter and leave the bay, floating past like moving mountains of steel, travelling to and from places that would always be names on a map to me, places I would never visit. Bremerhaven. Le Havre. Cadiz. Ships that sailed across the Atlantic, up the St. Lawrence River, and a thousand miles inland.

Hard-looking men stood at the railings of the ocean freighters, cigarettes hanging at an angle from their mouths. When the ships drew close, I would step out of the car to wave at the men. I would be wearing tight white shorts and a T-shirt, and they would smile and wave back, and sometimes grab their crotches or mutter something that would make other men standing near them laugh. As the ships passed, I would look at the sterns of the vessels to read their home ports, cities in Sweden or Yugoslavia or Greece or Taiwan or Panama, rusting hulks on morose journeys. I wondered if the men would picture me while lying in their beds that night, if they would remember the girl in the tight sweater, with long hair and good legs. I liked to think they would. The men looked dangerous, and I was near enough for them to absorb all they needed to absorb and too far away to reach it.

When it grew dark on the beach strip, boys wanted to do what boys always want to do with girls in cars at night. Sometimes it was a thrill and sometimes it wasn’t. But it was always exciting to watch the ships pass, and see the lonely men at the rail staring at me, a girl they would know only in their fantasies.

The lift bridge carries beach strip traffic across the canal, people in cars and people on bicycles and couples who walk along the beach for exercise. Twice every hour, an air horn blasts a warning before the bridge rises, and a man behind a high smoky glass window in a building next to the bridge changes the traffic lights from green to red, and pushes a switch to lower wooden arms over the road and walkway to hold back cars and people. When all is clear, the bridge begins to rise. If only pleasure boats are waiting to go through the canal, the bridge stops a few feet in the air and the boats pass beneath it quickly, the people in the boats waving at those strolling along the edge of the canal. If a freighter is passing through, the span rises to its full height, groaning like an old man lifting weights, all the way to the top and staying there, sometimes for a half-hour or more, until the ship passes through the canal.

You can walk along the canal beneath the lift bridge and stand there as the span first rises above you, then settles back down again. Boys used to leave pennies on the flat surface of the footings when the bridge was up. They would return after the bridge rose again half an hour later and retrieve the coins, pressed to paper-thin blotches of copper, until a fence was installed to keep them away, although the boys would climb or even tear down the wire fence to get to the footings. That’s what they’re called, the concrete pads that the bridge settles on. Footings. Gabe told me that. Gabe told me many things, and he avoided others.

High above the canal on the bay side, twin steel bridges carry traffic along the freeway. The highway bridges begin their rise a mile back on either side of the canal, and are more than two hundred feet above it at their peak. The traffic they carry is distant and uninteresting, which is how I suspect the people in those cars view us who live below them on the beach strip. The high bridges are on the beach strip, but they are not of it. I ignore them, like everyone else who lives on the strip. We develop blind eyes and selective ears. We ignore the high bridges and pretend not to hear the noise of the traffic they carry. We turn our backs on them, and on the oil-slicked bay and the steel mills with their slag and steam and smoke, and we look east across the lake extending to the Thousand Islands, lovely green and granite jewels that, in the pictures I have seen, look like pieces of paradise.

On the beach strip, we live between a distant heaven and a smoky hell.

MOTHER SUFFERED A STROKE TWO YEARS AGO, a knife-edge rupture, the doctors called it. The stroke left her mind intact but destroyed her ability to speak, and weakened her sense of balance so badly that she can’t walk safely. That’s when I found her a room at Trafalgar Towers and worked out an arrangement to do their books in return for her private room and some cash for me. This took an hour of negotiation with Helen Detwiler, who manages Trafalgar Towers. Helen has hair like steel wool, wears print dresses and drives a Buick. I could learn more about her, I suppose, but I have never had the inclination.

Mother sits and moves in a wheelchair, and needs special medication to hold the next stroke—the doctors talk about it the way people in California talk about the next earthquake—at bay. Otherwise, Mother is aware and alert, perpetually silent, sometimes angry, and always happy to see me. She appreciates what I have done for her.

Her room with a view of the lake is akin, I am told, to having a hotel room in Paris with a view of both the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame Cathedral, on a smaller scale. Mother takes pride in that. I have called her a View Snob, and she agrees. This is why she refused all of my invitations, half-hearted as they may have been, to come live with Gabe and me.

My visits with Mother at the end of each working day were usually brief. Perhaps once a month, or when Gabe would not be home in time, Mother and I would have dinner together. I would describe my day and talk about friends and relatives. My sister, Tina, and her husband in British Columbia. A cousin in New York. An aunt in Toronto. If Mother had a comment to make, she would write it on a small blackboard I bought her, tracing her comments with chalk in the lovely cursive handwriting that had won her awards in public school. She would write, Your hair is very nice today, but you should get a manicure. Or, You put too much salt on your potatoes. Mother will always be a mother.