Our mother thought our house was haunted. That’s one of the reasons she was a figure of ridicule. She’d told us many times that on the day she first stepped into the wedding cake she felt the chill of a house paid for by death. She heard voices. She saw things. She had always believed in ghosts, from her earliest days, before she ever met my father and became his wife. From the start of her marriage, she knew the wedding cake was full of spirits and that they wanted to talk to her and her alone.