Grandma June always kept the kitchen window cracked just enough to let the honeysuckle in, even when the humidity out by the bayou was thick enough to chew. Her pantry smelled like cloves, paper sacks that had seen three generations of groceries, and the cedar shavings she dropped behind the bottom shelf to keep out the silverfish. It was a small room, tucked right off the kitchen behind a louvered door that stuck if you pulled it too fast.

I spent eleven days at Mercy Hospital before she went, sitting in that Naugahyde chair that made your thighs stick in July.

I listened to the oxygen machine puff and click like an old grandfather clock that was losing its mind. I signed the hospice papers because my uncle Ray and my cousins wouldn’t answer their phones when the doctor called from the desk at 2:00 in the morning. I wiped the dry skin on the back of Grandma’s hands with cocoa butter she kept in her nightstand drawer.

So when I walked up the shell driveway and saw the back of my cousin Mark’s Ford pickup parked right on the grass where Grandma grew her zinnias, I didn’t think about property rights. I just thought about how much my feet hurt.

The tailgate was down. Mark was hoisting the cedar chest Grandma had bought off a traveling salesman back in nineteen-fifty-something into the truck bed with a grunt that made his face go purple. My cousin Denise was coming down the back steps with a stack of quilts wrapped in a black contractor bag.

Ronnie was right behind her carrying the good willow-pattern plates in a cardboard box from the liquor store.

“Oh, hey, Beth,” Denise said, not even dropping her chin. “We figured you wouldn’t mind us getting a head start on the heavy lifting. You know how Ronnie’s back gets when it rains.”

Ronnie didn’t look at me. He was wearing his fishing cap with the hook still stuck in the brim. “We’re just taking the sentimental stuff,” he muttered, like he was reading from an index card they’d written up in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly.