“Come on, Bonnie,” she said. She had sat down again. “You’re the only person I can ask. So I’m asking.” She paused and smiled. “And you have muscles now! You can throw boxes around.”

In a way, I was relieved that she was going to pack up the place and be done. But I dreaded going back inside that house. When a person dies, everything they owned dies with them. I didn’t want to touch dead things. Cleaning out the closets of a dead person is a sign that the grieving process has reached the later stages, experts say—you’ve become strong enough to murder whatever didn’t die already. Keep that stuff around, and it’s like the dead aren’t dead. It gives you ideas. My mother never threw out anything of my father’s, so it always seemed like he had taken a trip somewhere and could return at any moment. When she died, I sold the house with everything in it. The ancient Egyptians were onto something, packing the Pyramids with the deceased’s belongings, sealing up the tomb, walking away.

“Fine,” I said, finding the fastest route out of the conversation.

I figured I owed Krystal something. She had taken me in those first nights after the robbery. And I had a strange feeling, and had been feeling it increasingly during the years since my discovery of Three’s Company, that I was nearing a point—an end point, it felt like, though I could not have said what it was an ending to—that required all debts to be settled.

So starting in July, a month before I bought the winning tickets, I met Krystal in the driveway of Geannie and Jim’s house, and we entered the house together, and began packing up the belongings of the dead people we’d loved.

I interviewed contractors and workers in the living room of the new place. The room’s main features were a sprawling expanse of hardwood and a floor-to-ceiling fireplace on one wall. Three naked windows stretched daylight across everything. In my haste to get out of my trailer and into the future, I had not bothered much with furniture, not even drapes. My old armchair sat in the middle of the room like a throne. I had to bring in folding chairs I found in one of the outbuildings for extra seating. The arrangement resembled a church basement waiting for an AA meeting.

Ray Wineholt was the fourth contractor I interviewed, and the man who won the project. He didn’t raise an eyebrow at my bare living room, the first point in his favor, and I was reassured by his sturdy, flanneled presence. His voice was gentle and cigarette-rich. But I was most encouraged by his wild, mountain-man beard that hung down to his nipples. He smelled like laundry detergent, tobacco, and patchouli. Right away I could tell that he was a trustable and practical man, and that he had a glimmer of a savage artist deep within him. When he showed me hard-copy pictures of his work, they were faded and wrinkled at the edges, and exuded a faint vanilla scent I’d always associated with cheap air fresheners that dangled from rearview mirrors; I suspected they’d been forgotten in the backseat of his car for a year. Finally, here was someone who could appreciate damage.