“Because you gotta get it feeling homey again,” he explained.

“But . . . this woman knows that we’re moving soon. I told her, so she’d understand . . .”

“It’s not about what she knows, though,” said Trevor, “It’s about what she feels. Walking into this place. In her gut. You want to give her that nice feeling when she walks in the door — like: Oh, yeah, this is a good, cozy place to live.”

“It’s about creating an impression,” I suggested.

“Exactly,” said Trevor. “Right now, the impression is that you basically got Beaner living in a goddamn hotel lobby.”

“It’s staged,” I protested. “When you’re selling a house, you want it to look like —”

“I don’t buy that staging bullshit,” said Trevor, stretching in his kitchen chair. He was sitting with a juice glass of rum in front of him, rum I assumed must be left over from the night before, even though I was surprised to learn we hadn’t worked our way completely through the bottle. He’d offered me a shot after I came in from speaking to Jessica, but I’d shuddered at the idea, so he cracked a beer for me instead. I nursed it as I chopped. “You ask me,” he went on, “people wanna buy a house that looks like human beings live there. Not fuckin robots.”

I stopped chopping, irritated. “It doesn’t look like . . . a robot hotel. It just looks like a house that —”

“I’m just saying, for tomorrow,” said Trevor. “Homey touches. That’s what you want when this lady shows up. You want her to feel you’ve made a nice home for Beaner. Your mum was all about the homey touches.”

After the soup — which Trevor ate, though he made a point of leaving a soggy collection of carrot-coins in the bottom of his bowl on the grounds that they weren’t quite cooked enough for his taste — we went down to the basement cubby and hauled out a couple of my mother’s rugs, the single box of doilies and knick-knacks I’d held back from the yard sale because I couldn’t quite stand to part with them, and another box of framed photographs — the wedding photo, my long-gone dad riding a horse in Bermuda (on his honeymoon, his and Irene’s one and only trip outside the county), my mother’s nursing graduation photo — her old-fashioned cap affixed miraculously to her styled coif, her armful of roses, her eyes shining, gazing away from the camera as if so transfixed by the future she couldn’t even be bothered to acknowledge the current moment being captured for posterity. Photos of me and Kelli. As babies. As children. As adolescents. As young women. And that’s where the photos of me stopped — at my own graduation photo, to be precise (I was staring directly into the camera, unlike my mother, and for some reason had clenched my jaw instead of smiling. It was like a passport photo, utilitarian, saying nothing but Get me out of here). And although Kelli had no graduation photo, the pictures of her — at birthdays, at picnics, at outdoor concerts, getting bigger and older as she tore open Christmas presents by the tree — went on and on. A documentary in stills of an endless childhood. Trevor hung the photos up precisely where they’d been before.