A young woman’s mother was a flight attendant become travel agency worker for her husband’s two-branch agency, spanning the dividing line between working class and white collar, half East Asian and half Irish, born in the US, although her departed husband was a pure play immigrant from East Asia. The mother’s funeral was well attended by extended family members alone, meaning that despite the young woman bearing no children and having only one sibling, an older sister, there was no lack of commiseration. Her parents opted to have children late in life, implying that the death of the final remaining parent, her mother, was sad but not cruel, but this doesn’t lessen the grief of her passing, considering how close the final three had become. If there’s no one the Irish didn’t marry, in the extension were Italian as well as Spanish Americans, which clearly makes for raucous, observant and food-fuelled gatherings, which nobody can deny. The young woman was in a word silly, or in two words silly and kooky when this was fashionable, and she only became serious and sombre when discussing her parents and especially her mother, particularly of their travel bug years. However, though their business was low margin given the well-capitalized competition, with their spare cash the couple purchased mom-car-style real estate in unfashionable districts, they were then, and likewise given their background and the modes of housing their then-immigrant relatives would have chosen for themselves had there been a secret seraph or had they won a residential lottery with only one guaranteed winner. Times change, and nothing succeeds like being formerly unfashionable, because to qualify for gentrification, a neighborhood has to have had a heyday in the first place, and then gone totally downhill, uneven and cracked floors and the whole seven yards. Because the sister is overemployed and has a handful of children of her own to manage, it falls to the younger daughter to oversee the properties, which she does with panache and pride, scouring Angie’s List for ceiling repairmen when necessary, stocking up on sheets, pillow cases and coordinated slip covers from Bath & Beyond, organizing repainting between tenants and quietly encouraging wide-boy students to rent someplace more to their affluent style when they graduate, because they will be able to tap into their future salaries along with the slush fund hand me down droppings of their fathers the deputy ministers. The total return on these real estate investments would be astronomical, but if the two daughters sell what would she do in her spare time, and given the rental yields and carefully timed maintenance over the years, it doesn’t matter if a six bedroom property remains vacant for four to six weeks while the repainting and search for new tenants takes place, because the extant cash flow is abundant. Her parents provided for her well, confirming that there’s always space for another angel or two in heaven. She loves the interlude during tenant changeovers where she can, aside from fume over the condition left behind by the Eurotrash wide boys, giggle with a co-worker or two about what else the tenants have forgotten, for example more of the cartoon shampoo bottles we heard about earlier, and items that should and should not be age appropriate for students in their early 20s, such as cheap and cheerful liqueurs. Not everything can or should be recycled.