we went there every august until we did not. it had three small bedrooms upstairs and a kitchen with a tilted floor, so that a marble rolled from the back door to the front door if you set it down by the stove. our father grew up there; his father had built it himself, by which we mean he had directed two other men and supplied the nails.
we remember things in lists: the wasps in the corner of the porch, the window that whistled in the smallest wind, the rug that had been the colour of brick and became, by the end, the colour of nothing. the year before it was sold our father walked us slowly through each room and named the people who had slept in each bed. some of those people we had known. some of those people had been him.
it sold for less than was hoped. our mother said the new family put on an extension and the marble would no longer reach the door. our father did not say anything. he had been quiet about it for some weeks by then; he was practising, we think, for the silence the house was about to require.