Alice looked out the window at her house and pressed her hand to her mouth. She threw open the car door and jumped out, the smooth white gravel driveway crunching beneath her shoes. White gravel! “Oh,” she said ecstatically. “Look what we did!”

They first saw the house on a gloomy July day.

“Oh dear,” they both said simultaneously when they pulled up in front of it, and then as they sat there in Nick’s sister’s car, gazing at it for a few seconds, they both made rising “ummm?” sounds, which meant, “But maybe it’s got something?”

It was a ramshackle two-story Federation house with a sagging roof, blankets hanging in the windows instead of curtains, and an overgrown junkyard lawn. It looked sad and battered, but if you squinted your eyes, you could see the stately home it had once been.

The For Sale sign out front said POTENTIAL PLUS, and everyone knew what that meant.

“Too much work,” said Nick.

“Far too much,” agreed Alice, and they gave each other sidelong suspicious looks.

They got out of the car and stood shivering on the street, waiting for the real estate agent to arrive. The front door of the house creaked open and a bent old lady wearing a man’s jumper over a checked skirt, long socks, and sneakers came shuffling up the footpath toward the letterbox.

“Oh God,” said Alice in agony. It was bad enough when you caught a glimpse of a harried middle-aged couple rushing out to their car to drive away before you went stomping through their house, making disparaging remarks about their choice of carpet. It broke Alice’s heart when she saw the things they did to try to make their house sell—the fresh flowers, the kitchen counters with wet streaks from where they’d been vigorously wiped, the coffee plunger and cups placed just so on the living room table to make it look homey. Nick would snort cynically when people lit scented candles in the bathroom as if that’s the way they always lived, but Alice was always touched by their hopefulness. “Don’t go to all that effort to try and impress me,” she wanted to tell them. And now here was this ancient, trembly old lady. Where would she go on this freezing day while they looked at her house? Had she scrubbed the floors on arthritic knees for their appointment, when they probably wouldn’t even buy it?

“Hi!” called out Nick, while Alice shrank behind him, saying, “Shhh!” He pulled her out from behind him, and because she didn’t want to have a full-on wrestling match in public, she had no choice but to walk along beside him toward the old lady.

“We’re meeting the real estate agent here in a few moments,” explained Nick.

The old lady didn’t smile. “Your appointment isn’t until three.”

“Oh, no,” said Alice. There was something a bit familiar about the time three o’clock and she and Nick were always getting things like that wrong. (“God help you if you two ever have children,” Nick’s mother had said to them once.)

“Sorry about that,” said Nick. “We’ll go for a drive around the neighborhood. It looks beautiful.”

“You may as well come in now,” said the old lady. “I can do a better job of showing it to you than that smarmy weasel.”

Without waiting for an answer, she turned around and started shuffling up the path toward the house.

Nick whispered in Alice’s ear, “She’s going to put us in cages and fatten us up before she eats us.”

“Leave a trail of crumbs,” whispered back Alice.

Shaking with repressed laughter, they obediently followed her.

There were two stately sandstone lions at the top of the veranda stairs, guarding the house. Their eyes seemed to follow Nick and Alice as they walked by.

“Raaaah!” whispered Nick to Alice, lifting his hand like a claw, and Alice said, “Shhhh.”

Inside, the house was better and worse than they’d expected. There were soaring ceilings, ornate cornices and ceiling roses, original marble fireplaces; Nick quietly kicked back a corner of fraying old carpet to show Alice wide mahogany floorboards. At the same time there was a nose-tickling smell of damp and neglect, gaping holes in plaster, ancient moldy bathrooms, and a kitchen with 1950s linoleum and a stove that looked like it came from a museum.

The old lady sat them down in front of a single bar heater and brought them cups of tea and a plate of Scotch Finger biscuits, waving away Alice’s desperate offers to help. It was excruciating to watch her walk. She finally sat down with a dusty black old photo album.

“This is what the house looked like fifty years ago,” she said.

The photos were small and black-and-white, but you could still see that the house was once beautiful and proud, not the shrunken skeleton it had become.

The old lady pointed a yellowed fingernail at a photo of a young girl standing with her arms outspread in the front garden. “That was me on the day we moved in.”

“You were so pretty,” said Alice.

“Yes,” said the old lady. “I didn’t know it, of course. Just like you don’t know how pretty you are.”

“No she doesn’t,” agreed Nick solemnly, who was eating his third stale Scotch Finger as if he hadn’t eaten for a month.

“I should be leaving this house to my children and grandchildren,” said the old lady. “But my daughter died when she was thirty, and my son doesn’t talk to me anymore, and so I’m putting it on the market. I want two hundred thousand for it.”

Nick choked on his biscuit. The ad had listed it at over $300,000.

“The real estate agent will tell you I want a lot more, but I’m telling you if you offer that much, I’ll accept. I know I can probably get more than that from an investor who will do it up quick-sticks and sell it on, but I was hoping a young couple might buy it and take their time restoring it and bring back the happy memories. We had a lot of happy memories here. Even though you probably can’t feel them, they’re here.”

She spat out the words “happy memories” with slight disgust.

“It could be beautiful,” continued the old lady as if she were reprimanding them. “It should be beautiful. Just a bit of a spit and polish.”

Later in the car, they sat and looked at the house silently.

“Just a bit of a spit and polish,” said Alice.

Nick laughed. “Yeah, gallons of spit and truckloads of polish.”