I walk to James’s area, make a small promise about doing better, and keep going. I stroll out of the garden and down the road towards the shed. The day is clear, blue, and mild. A bearded dragon sits on a fencepost in the sun, statue-still. The cooler weather should have slowed him to a near-sleep state, somewhere unseen, but he’s out grabbing a last chance at warmth. I feel like I should admire him for his pluck and resilience — things James would be impressed by. But I’m not recovering that quickly.

It is mail day, and I realise I am walking towards the mailbox. It is, after all, where the boxes come from.

My mother would sometimes walk to the mailbox to get the mail for exercise and to ‘keep in shape’. When she was sick she did it every mail day. Sarah and I knew something was wrong before Dad did. She would ask for my help with simple things like writing an email to one of her charity groups. The explanation was usually that she ‘wasn’t very good with computers’, and they ‘never did what they were told’. It was a believable excuse. She wasn’t very good with computers, and she certainly wasn’t patient with them. But I realised after a while that she was having trouble putting words together, and she had never had trouble with that. She was always confident in her words, and then she wasn’t. She was only in her fifties, and I was in my twenties, and I couldn’t work out what was going on. I remember her laughing at herself when she got something wrong or forgot an incident that had only recently happened. Then she would often blame a ‘virus thing’ she’d had that was ‘clogging up her brain’, and I suppose I fell for these justifications, even though I knew I had seen moments of stress and fear on her face that were quickly concealed.

I pick up a rusty bolt I notice in the gravel on the side of the road and stick it in my pocket, and then start to talk to her, telling her everything that has happened, that I have felt, that I have done. And I apologise for not having paid enough attention to her. My father and I. Neither of us paid enough attention. My mother would not have wanted attention, and it probably wouldn’t have made a difference, but we still should have done it.

I follow the road as it snakes through the trees and straightens in sight of the ramp and the mailbox. I see the mailman’s vehicle nearing, and I break into a run. If I’m not quick, I’ll miss him.