I can hear talking on the front porch. I catch snippets . . . sweet she’s so protective . . . and Lettie’s voice: she’s a good kid.

I kick one of the boxes. It smashes into the wall behind the bed and the quilt slips down, covering them all up again.

The place is quiet when Lettie steps back in.

She hands me another tissue. “Come on. I’ll show you something.” She takes me to the spare room, opens the door. It’s filled with large clear plastic containers. All full. All full of crap, floor to ceiling, with space left for the window and to squeeze in between, like tiny supermarket aisles.

She smiles. “See?”

“Is this everything?” I blow my nose.

“No.”

“Did they throw everything else out?”

“Some of it.”

I raise an eyebrow.

“A lot of it.” Her smile fades a bit.

I sniff. “It’s pretty organized, I guess.” I glance up at the boxes near the top; they stretch up to the ceiling. “There’s a lot in here, still.”

Lettie smiles. “You should see the shed.”

“INSIDE KETTLE?” LETTIE waves a shiny new-looking electric kettle at me from the kitchen. “Shall we sit at the table?”

Her kitchen is nice now. Chairs; a table you can sit at. A gleaming clean floor. But it smells like chemicals and paint and whatever they put on the floorboards. And something else that I’m not sure is actually there or is just a nose memory. Something pungent, and animal. The scalpy overripe smell of its past.

I tell her I’d rather sit on the porch.

She nods and follows me out. Flicks on the old kettle on her tea chest.

“Aren’t you sad, Lettie?”

She watches the kettle boil. “I don’t know why I stay, really. It’s worse that it’s clean. It’s like going back to a place that you remember only to find it’s not there anymore.”

I sit very still.

“Memories are a bit like houses, don’t you think? They scaffold all this stuff. Curate it; give things a place so you feel safe and secure. And you step through the rooms and remember what was. But it’s not real, they’re just walls. And before you know it, most of your life is just memories, some of them not even that clear. And it’s just a house that reminds you what it felt like when you thought it was a home. You don’t realize how ephemeral it is. How temporary. That it’s just all going to be something you remember. And the memories that made you feel safe, made you feel like you, are just a flimsy reminder of what’s gone to dust and that every second that passes is going to be the same, just something you remember.”