The cool air coming up from the meat freezer felt good against my face. I saw the amber bottles set on the windowsill above the washer to keep belly-crawling burglars out. I saw the purple glass bottles on the ledge of its mate.

I had never thought of how one cut up a body, only of the freedom to be had postsevering. The grisly reality of the sawing and the butchering had never preoccupied me. It was the instant flash, the twitched nose of Bewitched, the magic of going from having my mother to not having her that held me in its thrall. More than butchering her, if I could have chosen it, I would have changed her body from solid to liquid to gas. I wanted her to evaporate like water. Rising up out of my life and leaving everything else intact.

“If you aren’t careful,” my mother would say, “you’ll fall in.” At eleven, twelve, thirteen, I would be in the kitchen, leaning over, looking into the refrigerator for what I could eat. I perused the food with such care only when I thought it was safe. At other times I tried to act as if food didn’t matter to me, as if it were too much of a bother. “Oh! There! That’s food? Hmmm.” But with my head in the refrigerator, I was the perfect prey, and as she listed my flaws-the ballooning ass, the “near matronly” thighs, the swinging arms I’d eventually have, like “a dimpled flesh bat,” if I went on in my way-I would look at the tiny light in the refrigerator and wonder, Could I move in there? Could I hide behind the cottage-cheese container and the orange juice made from concentrate? It would be quiet inside the refrigerator once my mother closed the door. I could disappear in there.

I was staring into the meat freezer, at the millions of ice crystals built up along its sides and covering the two hams and lean patties in a shimmering mink of ice, and then I wasn’t. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the blue Pigeon Forge bowl.

“Mrs. Castle, will you take that downstairs?” I could hear my mother saying. “Maybe bring something else up.”

I walked over to the card table and picked up the bowl. Nearby, hanging from a hook on the wall, I found a heavy rusted pair of shearing scissors. I turned the bowl upside down on the table and brought the handle of the scissors down hard, like a hammer. The blue-glazed shards scuttled off the table and across the floor.

I could not cut my mother up, so I walked over to her body and bent down near her head. I hovered over her briefly, then unwrapped the blankets around her face. There were her eyes, staring up at me, milky and blue. With the scissors poised in my right hand, I dug out her silver braid and sheared it off at the root.

FIVE

While my mother lay on the floor only a few feet away, I opened the old brown refrigerator and sat on the bottom step of the stairs with its light shining on me.

I grabbed blindly at the metal tins, not looking at the age-old and carefully punched-out labels. I ripped off their worn lids and sent them crashing to the concrete floor like spinning cymbals. Then, and only then, when faced with the used and reused wax paper, did I slow down and lift that first layer lightly away from what lay beneath. Here were brandy balls from my Tennessee grandmother’s recipe. Or pecan meringues that smelled of dark-brown sugar. Baking together was something we did until the end, even though, for the sake of my figure and my mother’s health, I routinely had to cycle through the freezer and dispose of what we’d made, pretending to my mother that I was giving the contents of the tins to the neighbors whom she still confusedly remembered living in the area.

I held a meringue and crumbled it in my hand. I watched the light-tan dust and minced nuts fall to the ground. Always the admonition to use a plate, not to gobble like a turkey, to measure the heft and weight and imagine it applied to my waist.

The first time I had made myself sick as a child-purposely sick-was the year I turned eight. My weapon of choice was fudge. I had gone into the kitchen and methodically, like a soldier taking bullets in the gut, eaten a whole baking sheet of butterscotch fudge. I was ill for two days, and she was furious, but it had made my father laugh. He had come home and hung up his jacket on the coatrack inside the door; placed his hat, on which he often changed the small clipped feather that was tucked inside the band, on the front table; and turned toward the dining room.

“What are you doing there all alone?” he asked.

I had been forced to sit at the table, though all I wanted to do was lie down and moan.

“She’s being punished,” my mother had said, as she walked briskly over to him and took his briefcase from his hand. “I made butterscotch fudge, and she ate it all.”

A particular intimacy of my father’s came when he removed his glasses. The metal-and-plastic frames bit into his nose on either side, and he would take them off when he walked in the house. For thirty minutes he was as blind as a bat, but he didn’t need accuracy, as this was the half hour before dinner reserved for a drink.

He had done this that day, as usual, but he had also laughed, as he usually did not, and it had come from someplace deep inside him. During this, he had grabbed my mother and kissed her hard on the cheek and then leaned down and kissed me on the forehead through my wispy bangs.

Working at the Pickering Water Treatment Plant, he measured water levels and analyzed the content of the local reservoirs. He traveled to surrounding cities and all the way to Erie to do the same.

“It’s a little like you sat down and decided to eat a baking sheet full of sediment,” he said. “Anyone would be ill from that.”

I had asked him to stay at the table with me, to talk about water, about how each droplet under a microscope differed from another. His eyes were unfocused without his glasses, and I wondered how blind he was and what he saw when he looked at me.

I walked up the basement stairs and into the kitchen, the braid swinging from my fist. I pulled open the drawer near the phone, which held refolded tinfoil and salvaged twist ties, and found a gallon-size Ziploc freezer bag. I tucked the braid inside, sealed it, and scanned the kitchen. My mother’s clothes lay balled up in moist clumps along the floor.

When I was three years old, I had come into the kitchen and found my mother sitting on the floor, with her legs jutting out in front of her. I could see her underwear, which I had never seen before. She was staring at a white spill of flour at her feet.

“Mom made a boo-boo,” I said.

She stood up and grabbed the five-pound sack of flour from the counter, hugging it to her chest. She scooped her hand into it and let the contents fall from her fingers like snow.

I shrieked in delight and ran to her. She responded by moving away just as I reached out for her. She threw more flour from the sack, this time in wide arcs across the kitchen. I chased her in spinning circles, around and around, shrieking louder and gulping back my own laughter.

The chase went on until I stumbled and fell. I looked up at her for a moment. She stood near my high chair, laughing. I noticed the flour on her forehead and chin, and how it coated the invisible hairs on her forearms. I wanted her to come to me to pick me up, and so I wailed at the top of my lungs.

My purse sat upright on the dining room table. I tucked the Ziploc bag, with its silver prize, inside the center compartment and, as if I might forget something, looked all around me, doing a 360-degree turn. I jumped when I saw Mr. Fletcher in a lit-up window, staring back at me, until I realized I had not turned on a light in the dining room and that he was staring not at me but at a computer terminal, which, as he searched the Internet or played the same Byzantine games that Emily’s husband liked, lit his face in flashes of blue and green.