Susan seemed to shake herself out of her mood. Turning to Mma Ramotswe, she smiled as she said, “Of course I am, Mma Ramotswe. I’m just thinking.” She looked about her, and pointed to a corner of the yard abutting on Mma Ramotswe’s yard. “We kept hens, you know. We kept them down there. They were moved there because there was a cockerel who used to wake my mother with his—”

“Boasting,” interjected Vain. “Those guys make such a noise, don’t they? Yok, yok, yok…”

Mma Ramotswe looked at him with amusement. That was not the sound a cockerel made—not in her view. “A cockerel that made a sound like that would not be feeling well,” she said, with a grin.

Vain took the jibe in good spirit. “Perhaps you’re right, Mma. I’m not good with sounds.”

“Cockerels go croo, croo, croo,” said Mma Ramotswe. “And their wives go pock, pock, pock.”

Mma Ramotswe saw that Susan had turned away. She spotted the furtive movement, the reaching for a handkerchief, or a tissue, and the wiping of the eyes. She regretted the levity of her exchange with Vain; this was not the moment to discuss the language of chickens.

She laid a hand gently on Mma Susan’s shoulder. She reminded herself of what had been said about her parents: the mother dead and the father in a home, his memory gone, his past deleted. “I understand, Mma,” she whispered.

Mma Susan half turned, but did not look at Mma Ramotswe. She reached up and touched the hand upon her shoulder, acknowledging the sympathy. “It was so long ago,” she said. “Things look different, I think.”

“They will do,” said Mma Ramotswe. “We want them to look the same, but…well, they change. People move things about.”

She thought of Mochudi, and of how she often made that short journey back into her own past. As she saw the village regularly, changes did not surprise her; a new road, a recently constructed building, a wall painted a different colour—these were things that you took in your stride as part of the organic aging of the world about you, but then you looked at an old photograph and saw the place as you had known it in your youth and you were reminded then that the world was slipping away, slowly slipping away.